Security News

GitHub will start requiring active developers to enable two-factor authentication on their accounts beginning next week, on March 13. The gradual rollout will start next week with GitHub reaching out to smaller groups of administrators and developers via email and will speed up as the end of the year approaches to ensure that onboarding is seamless and users have time to sort out any issues.

On Android, Google offers its own authenticator app, unsurprisingly called Google Authenticator, that you can get from Google Play. Google's add-on app does the job of generating the needed one-time login code sequences, just like Apple's Settings > Passwords utility on iOS. But we're going to assume that at least some people, and possibly many, will perfectly reasonably have asked themselves, "What other authenticator apps are out there, so I don't have to put all my cybersecurity eggs into Apple's basket?".

Using texts is insecure for doing 2FA, So if you want to keep it up you're going to have to pay. The bulletin says that "After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text message 2FA still enabled will have it disabled."

Twitter has announced that starting with March 20, users who don't pay the Twitter Blue subscription will no longer be able to use the SMS-based two-factor authentication option. Twitter CEO Elon Musk further explained the rationale behind the move by claiming that "Twitter is getting scammed by phone companies for $60M/year of fake 2FA SMS messages."

Twitter has announced that it will no longer support SMS two-factor authentication unless you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription. In a blog post released this week, Twitter said that non-Twitter Blue users using SMS 2FA authentication have until March 20th, 2023, to switch to another 2FA method, or it will be disabled.

Hackers breached CircleCi in December after an engineer became infected with information-stealing malware that their 2FA-backed SSO session cookie, allowing access to the company's internal systems. In a new security incident report on the attack, CircleCi says they first learned of the unauthorized access to their systems after a customer reported that their GitHub OAuth token had been compromised.

A new targeted phishing campaign has zoomed in on a two-factor authentication solution called Kavach that's used by Indian government officials. LNK files are used to initiate code execution which eventually downloads and runs a malicious C# payload, which functions as a remote access trojan," Securonix researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a new report.

Comcast Xfinity customers report their accounts being hacked in widespread attacks that bypass two-factor authentication. Similar to Gmail, Xfinity allows customers to configure a secondary email address to be used for account notifications and password resets in the event they lose access to their Xfinity account.

GitHub will require all users who contribute code on the platform to enable two-factor authentication as an additional protection measure on their accounts by the end of 2023. Imposing 2FA as a mandatory measure for all GitHub accounts will make the platform a safer space where users can feel more confident about the quality of the code they download from repositories.

As you'll know if ever you've lost a phone, or damaged a SIM card, mobile phone numbers aren't burned into the phone itself, but are programmed into the subscriber identity module chip that you insert into your phone. A crook who can sweet-talk, or bribe, or convince using fake ID, or otherwise browbeat your mobile phone provider into issuing "You" a new SIM card.