The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced a new requirement impacting all major retail banks in the country to phase out the use of one-time passwords (OTPs) within the next three months to protect consumers against phishing and other scams.  The article says, “The use of OTP was introduced in the 2000s as a multi-factor authentication option to strengthen online security.”  OTPs can be intercepted by man-in-the-middle attacks, and if they’re SMS-based, they can be intercepted by threat actors who conduct SIM-swapping attacks.

You can read the article here.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is the central bank and financial regulatory authority of Singapore. While there are no indicators that banking authorities in the U.S. are planning a crackdown on OTPs, it might be a good time for your bank to review authentication methods for both customer and employee applications and take action to replace SMS-based authentication methods because of the possibility of SIM-swapping attacks.

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