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Comment by bonton89 | Hacker News Reader

From the sounds of it they had disabled MFA since it was to annoying, but the phone number was still setup to be able to do a password recovery (probably by default I'm guessing) so really the phone number was the only thing required to get in.

I wonder if MFA even was at play here. If you can reset the password with nothing but a SIM-swapped phone number then the password was basically vestigial. And if you were using text for 2FA then really it was single factor the whole time even though you might not realize it.

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This is one of the reasons that I try to avoid giving companies my number. I'm always worry that they will decide that it is a valid recovery mechanism for my account. (Either that it is required locking me out or that it is sufficient allowing takeover)

Which worse? Your SIM as an alternate password, or public information about you being your alternate password? ("Security" questions and "identity verification")

You don't have to give true answers to security questions, FWIW.

I thought this was a good strategy too until some one said that a customer service rep once asked him one of the questions over the phone and, lacking his backed up security questions at hand, he just said "it is a bunch of random characters" and was let through...

Probably the best bet is using a passphrase here but it might not be fool proof.

I've started to make up answers that could be accurate, but aren't obvious / the first thing someone would guess. For example, if the question is "where were you born?", I pick a random city.

Yep. All of my answers are GUIDs that I keep track of in 1Password.

I have read a suggestion that one should pick real (but randomly generated) words because, where it is possible to call the company that maintains your account, an attacker might claim that the recovery answer is a series of random characters, and there is a chance that the employee will accept this and allow the attacker access to the account.

How about no alternatives? The password being the only authentication mechanism.

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