Many organizations are moving to 2FA/MFA
Many organizations are moving to 2FA/MFA
Posted Jul 14, 2022 15:15 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: Many organizations are moving to 2FA/MFA by hmh
Parent article: "Critical" projects and volunteer maintainers
TOTP can be phished, it's maybe going to be a bit harder to phish the sort of person who writes a Python package than my mother, but on the other hand it's probably a spear phishing exercise and so the attacker is putting real work in not just spewing out a million bogus emails claiming to be from FedEx or whoever. This is why FIDO is so important that it's worth spending money (not very much money in the larger scheme of things, but spending money is annoyingly difficult in the sort of organisations that have money) to give people FIDO authenticators rather than just point them at TOTP. The "cheapest" viable attacks on FIDO appear to be: Persuade the user to give you their physical token e.g. call them and insist it needs replacing, send a "courier" to pick it up (this sounds like a good way to get arrested, Police may not understand Internet crimes, but they have seen this trick done with credit cards for decades). Persuade the user to install malware which can request suitable login credentials and send them to you, and then persuade the user to physically authorise that authentication. Both ideas are something you could imagine a state actor pulling off but aren't very practical for small time crooks, bored teenagers and suchlike real world attackers.
The difficult-to-acquire thing is probably given a misleading impression by the fact these tend to be US projects. Americans have a much easier time sending physical objects to a handful of countries and those are listed. But I assure you that a hacker living in Moscow right now, regardless of how they feel about their country's invasion of Ukraine, can get themselves a FIDO authenticator if they want one for example.
