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by Too 3026 days ago
SMS is already 2fa. You need the sim card and the pin code. Hence a hijacked phone could be seen as stronger than a 1fa password.
2 comments

Unfortunately the network security is kind of a joke so an attacker can intercept your messages if he is near you.

Not to mention that traffic inside the network is not encrypted so a lot of parties have legitimate access to the messages anyway.

I understand your point but SMS should not be used as the only factor for authentication.

Correct me if I am wrong, but these SMS-based login setups are only sending a message to your phone number. It's about as secure as sending an email to your email address. There is no end-to-end security between the original sender and the subscriber's phone and SIM card to ensure that the message only gets to the correct recipient.

You only need to hijack the victim's phone number so that messages are sent elsewhere. This can be done by technical or social hacks such as porting the subscriber's number to a new provider or pretending a phone was lost and having the phone company register a replacement SIM. There is no need to physically intercept the victim's phone, so it is not in fact a second factor.