The sooner you act to preempt account takeovers from there, the better off you’ll be. If your smartphone suddenly stops working, or messages stop going through, you know you’ve lost your SIM. Steps in a SIM hack A SIM card (SIM is short for subscriber identity module) is a small integrated circuit that stores an ID and key that are used to authenticate a phone number as part of a telephone carrier’s network.

The other step you can take, however pat it sounds, is vigilance. So, one strategy to protect against a SIM hack is to implement a few security best practices to reduce vulnerability and the overall chance of becoming a target. “They’re struggling to find something they can use to identify you, and sadly they’ve decided on the phone number, which is not incredibly secure.” Calling your carrier and setting up this PIN or notifying them of your concern for this hacking technique can prevent it from happening. We don’t want national ID cards, and we don’t have any central authentication authority,” says Wisniewski. “The challenge we have is these app developers need a universal identifier, and they’ve just decided that the phone numbers as good as anything. Which, again, gets back to the core problem. Ellis Pinsky of New York was accused of using SIM swaps to steal approximately 71.4 million dollars in cryptocurrency. But it can also be used to steal your identity, and, in some examples, to steal money from your bank account. But Wisniewski suggests that the added complexity it adds to your life might not be worth it for most people, especially since so many apps tie your account to the number associated with your phone. Sim-jacking is usually used to steal cryptocurrency, or gain access to high-value accounts to send malware to followers. For services that require a phone number of some sort on record, you can swap in a Google Voice number, for instance.

Prevent sim card hack