I imagine a world where you go into the cell store, and they demand three forms of identification including a utility bill to talk to you. I can already hear the complaints from a much larger portion of their customer base.
If they actually took part that seriously, most identification could be done with a PIN or a password or whatever and the serious identification could be reserved for people who've actually forgotten.
You give one example. It also applies when people lose the password for an account, no longer have access to their original or backup email, etc. The most secure thing to do is probably to tell the customer "tough." But that won't go over very well so account recovery practices get put in place that are probably susceptible to social engineering attacks.
It would be similar to the account recovery aspect of Google's Advanced Protection Program: "A common way that hackers try to access your account is by impersonating you and pretending they have been locked out of your account. To give you the strongest protection against this type of fraudulent account access, Advanced Protection adds extra steps to verify your identity during the account recovery process. If you ever lose access to your account and both of your Security Keys, these added verification requirements will take a few days to restore access to your account."[1]
Thread https://twitter.com/stephendpalley/status/102973234509876428...
I don't know whether in this case the victim was using SMS codes, or whether the attacker used their phone number as part of a more involved attack (e.g. calling customer support and impersonating the victim). Even if you don't use SMS codes, there are a number of attacks that are opened up if someone seizes your cell phone number.
In general, however, I think it would be a good thing if service providers were held liable for damages occurring due to account breaches; that's the only way we're going to get proper account security. Schneier has written on this subject extensively, e.g. https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2003/11/liability_c....
Usually the attack is done against an individual who is known to have significant crypto assets and is using Gmail. By default if you enable 2fa on your Gmail account, sms based 2fa is activated as backup.
The attacker social engineers the phone provider to port the victims number, then resets the victims Gmail account, uses Android device manager to wipe their devices, and using the details found in Gmail they proceed to gain access to other accounts owned by the victim. The main goal being to social engineer access to services where they store crypto or to find unencrypted wallet backups in the cloud.
Now there is https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/, which might be a better option -- interested to know if you've got any opinions on that scheme.
When I was surprised that this is all the authn they needed, the sales guy joked with the rhetorical question “well, you are <my name>, right?” i.e. “well, it ain’t a problem at the moment, right?”
Is that more or less likely than SMS providers fixing their security?
Suppose you own a coffee shop and offer free wifi, should you be held responsible if someone logs into a bank without SSL and gets their credentials sniffed?
Should you be responsible for designing a wifi protocol that uniquely encrypts the traffic of each user, without shared keys, to prevent sniffing?
I'm sure you mean TOTP, but it's an important distinction to make. All 2FA isn't created equal.
Two factor authentication is when you need both a password and an SMS token, like how GitHub does it.
I'm not saying SMS 2fa is strong enough, often passwords are weak and/or weakly guarded, and ostensibly phone numbers can be fidgeted with. But having a phone number be the only thing guarding your entire identity is a whole next level of weak.
How about, if you forget your password and can’t get into your account, you need to visit a store in person to show your ID, or mail in a notarized copy, or something like that?
It also introduces plenty of other problems. For example, if you are mugged on the street and lose your phone and wallet are you just frozen out of your mobile account until you can get to the DMV and wait the month until you get a new ID?
It is a hard problem that can't just be fixed by "taking it seriously".
Stop giving out my data/access to anyone but me. Once you set a general company attitude towards distribution of data/access, you can't ask for pity when that attitude comes back to bite you. Collect less, lock it down, proliferate it less, etc. Then you'll get my sympathy when an employee at one of your stores gives away my data/access.
And no, restricting data/access and ease of use are not completely mutually exclusive. There is a harmonious middle of the venn diagram that is completely different to the way things are currently run. Nobody's asking to force 2FA on cell phones here (unless we opt-in), we're just asking for better identity verification and less apathy towards giving out my info (in all cases).
But the problem is the company doesn't know who "you" are.
Perhaps a series of strong security questions(no 'mothers maiden name' type), and if failed, you must present ID at a physical location.
Perhaps a copy of an ID or other photo on file that you could match/resend?
Maybe an option to 'lock' the account to changes, that can only be unlocked by the user when logged in, or by visiting a store?
Just off the top of my head, I can think of hundreds of things these companies could be doing better..many of which are not 100% foolproof, but far ahead of what they're doing now.
AT&T sorta offers this - there's an enhanced security option that lets you provide a password or PIN if you want to make account changes. This is allowed in lieu of ID.
My AT&T account is technically still tied to my father-in-law, because my wife and I took it over over a decade ago, when we were still in college. They no longer have AT&T phones and I consider it my account, but whenever I visit a store I have to provide the password before I can upgrade my phone or change the service plan. To move the account into my name would require me and my FIL to visit a store together, which is inconvenient enough that we've not bothered.