# SIM Swapping An account-takeover attack that hijacks a victim's **phone number** rather than their device. The attacker contacts the victim's mobile carrier, impersonates them using personal data gathered beforehand (from social media, phishing, or dark-web breach dumps), and requests that the number be "ported" to a new SIM card the attacker holds — sometimes by bribing a carrier employee to do it directly. The moment the swap completes, the victim's phone loses service and every call and text now flows to the attacker. ## Why it's so damaging: the 2FA bypass SIM swapping is potent because so much account security still rests on the phone number. The hijacked number receives the **SMS one-time codes** used for two-factor authentication, and it is the recovery channel for password resets. With control of the number, an attacker cascades through the victim's digital life — email first, then everything email can reset: bank accounts, social-media profiles, and, most lucratively, cryptocurrency wallets and exchange accounts, where stolen funds are irreversible and hard to trace. The attack is the clearest argument for why **SMS-based 2FA is considered weak**, and why security professionals push app-based authenticators or hardware keys instead. ## Notable cases - **Jack Dorsey (2019)** — Twitter's own CEO had his account hijacked via a SIM swap that intercepted his SMS codes. - **Michael Terpin (2018)** — a crypto investor lost a reported **$23.8 million** to a SIM-swap theft. - **Coinbase (2021)** — at least ~6,000 users had crypto stolen in a campaign exploiting SMS-2FA weaknesses. - **The SEC X account (January 2024)** — attackers SIM-swapped their way into the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's official X/Twitter account and posted a fake announcement that Bitcoin ETFs had been approved; Bitcoin spiked, then dropped ~6% once Chair Gary Gensler flagged the hijack — a vivid demonstration of how an account takeover becomes **market manipulation and disinformation**, not just theft. ## Right-wing-KB relevance SIM swapping connects this knowledge base's cybersecurity, [[Cryptocurrency]], and disinformation threads. The SEC episode shows the political-information dimension directly: hijacking a *trusted institutional account* lets an attacker publish official-looking falsehoods that move markets and mislead the public — an account-takeover route to the same ends as a [[Hack-and-Leak Operation]] or [[Deep Fakes]]. It also underscores how thin the security is around the identities of officials, candidates, and agencies whose phone numbers are the soft underbelly of their entire online presence. ## Distinct from neighbors - **[[Smishing and Vishing]]** — social-engineering *lures*; SIM swapping hijacks the *number itself* (and vishing is often how the carrier is fooled). - **Phishing/credential theft** — steals a password; SIM swapping defeats the *second factor* that a password alone wouldn't. - **Account takeover (general)** — SIM swapping is the *phone-number* route to it, especially effective against SMS-2FA-protected accounts. - **Port-out fraud** — a near-synonym emphasizing the carrier "port" step. ## See Also - [[Cybersecurity Lexicon]] - [[Smishing and Vishing]] - [[Cryptocurrency]] - [[Hack-and-Leak Operation]]