Our telephone number has become almost an equivalent to our digital ID, and it is the key that gives us access to many platforms, which allows us to confirm our identity to carry out all types of transactions and many more actions. which this combination of numbers is crucial to link our person with them.
However, when we change telephone company, you move to another country or you are being harassed by telephone, in many cases users choose to completely change their telephone number and cancel the one they had. But FACUA warns that by doing this It is crucial to carry out an action that many people forget and it can trigger a series of cyber attacks because you are facilitating access to all your accounts.
This is because today social networks and in general the vast majority of apps and platforms that we have installed and use every day, They use our phone number as a login system or to recover access codes. And even in some applications it is enough to enter a mobile number for certain social networks to indicate who is the owner of the account linked to it.
The problem with this comes when we change our phone number and we do not unlink it from all these sites in which it is registeredsince this puts our privacy at risk. The reason for this is as simple as that Teleoperators can assign the telephone line to a new user once thirty days have passed since it was deregistered by the previous owner.
All this makes it convenient to unlink the number that is going to be discarded from all the social networks, websites and apps in which the user is registered. It is quite common for them to send an SMS or a WhatsApp message to said line with a code when a password recovery is requested. Many also allow you to use it to log in as an alternative to the username or email.
This means that A user who receives a phone number that another owner previously had could request a password recovery from a social network that belongs to the former owner of the line, thus managing to change the passwords and have access to said user’s profile.
This action represents unauthorized access, and could be carried out by the new owner of the number even without knowing it, thinking that they are asking for the key to their own networks. In any case, control of the account would pass into the hands of the new owner of the phone numberwhich among other things would access all your private messages sent and received.
#mistake #changing #phone #number #giving #access #accounts
