Many of us know or heard about how easy it is for cyber criminals to circumvent the SMS based 2FA authentication. While SIM swap scams are around for a while but according to FBI, it is currently on the rise. Ideally, you should use the authenticator app or better yet, hardware keys for 2FA but if the website only offers SMS based 2FA you have no choice but to use that. Unfortunately, lot of websites including some financial/banking websites offer only SMS based 2FA. If you are a T-Mobile customer, you can secure your SMS based authentication slightly better with T-Mobile SIM swap protection feature. I don’t know how well it actually protects but it is better than nothing. Log into your T-Mobile account and navigate to Account/Profile/Privacy & Notification/SIM protection to toggle it on as shown on the screenshot below. For convenience, the link below will take you to this setting directly if you are already logged into your T-Mobile account.
https://www.t-mobile.com/account/profile/fraud-block/simswap
Related Link:
https://www.wirefly.com/news/fcc-proposes-new-rules-stop-sim-swap-attacks
