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The Securities and Exchange Commission has linked a SIM swapping attack to its account breach on X earlier this month, which led to the creation of a fake post announcing approval<\/a> of Bitcoin ETFs that caused the cryptocurrency\u2019s price to spike. In an update on Monday<\/a>, the SEC says an \u201cunauthorized party obtained control of the SEC cell phone number\u00a0associated with the account in an apparent \u2018SIM swap\u2019 attack.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A SIM-swapping attack occurs when a bad actor obtains a victim\u2019s phone number through techniques like social engineering. That allows the attacker to intercept calls and texts intended for the victim, including two-factor authentication codes, which they can then use to sign in to their victim\u2019s accounts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the SEC\u2019s case, a bad actor reset the password for its X account after gaining control of the phone number linked to it. While the SEC says multifactor authentication was previously enabled on the agency\u2019s X account, it was \u201cdisabled by X Support, at the staff\u2019s request, in July 2023 due to issues accessing the account.\u201d The SEC only reenabled MFA after it realized its account was compromised on January 9th, and says it has MFA active on all of its other social media accounts that have the option.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n