16 June

I’d encourage everybody to take precautions against SIM porting and SIM swapping. Porting: hackers port your phone number to a different Telco, so they can then set up a mobile phone in your name and take your number. They can then potentially access all of your accounts, including your bank, as well as you losing all of the personal data on your phone. Due to new precautions Australia set up to prevent this, where your Telco now sends a 4-digit code to your phone before porting, hackers will now also try SIM swapping. This is them contacting your Telco and pretending to be you, asking for a replacement SIM. This is very hard to stop. In both porting and swapping, they use personal information about you, either stolen through hacks or freely available on peoples’ social media accounts. One reason I don’t share much personal information on social media. For example your birthday and address should never be clearly visible on social media. Birthday messages should be restricted to friends-only groups. The SIM protect website set up by an Australian academic (see linked site) gives good tips to protect yourself. https://www.simprotect.org.au