Declan Harrington, a Massachusetts man charged two years ago for his alleged involvement in a series of SIM swapping attacks, pleaded guilty to stealing cryptocurrency from multiple victims and hijacking the Instagram account of others.
SIM swapping (aka SIM hijacking) attacks make it possible for malicious actors to take control of their targets’ mobile phone numbers by tricking or bribing employees of mobile phone service providers to reassign the numbers to attacker-controlled SIM cards.
This allows the crooks to completely take control of victims’ phone numbers and use them to bypass SMS-based multi-factor authentication (MFA), steal credentials, and hijack online accounts.