Ask HN: Daily Twilio OTP attacks, why, just why?

4 points by sf4lifer 2 years ago | 5 comments

We're experiencing daily twilio OTP attacks that create accounts. We block IPs and have throttled rate of account creation. But other than running up our bills (~$10 / day) I don't understand what they gain from this. Why are they doing this? What am I missing?

leftcenterright 2 years ago |

Most likely this is being abused for SMS pumping fraud where rogue network providers/small providers complicit in fraud use the traffic to generate revenue.

- https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/8360406023067-S...

tripue 2 years ago |

They often take a share of the revenue from those attacks through iprn number or other fraud schemes

sf4lifer 2 years ago | |

Interesting! That would explain motivation. Any insight on how to track if we're on one of those lists and remove ourselves?

tripue 2 years ago | | |

Well phone number can always be re attributed to a real user so it’s rare that a deny list is the only indicator used to prevent fraud, at least that’s not how our antispam works at https://ding.live :)

Raed667 2 years ago |

If your business is local, maybe limit the accepted numbers to a specific area or country.

Otherwise try to understand if they're automating account creation or are they doing it manually? maybe a captcha/turnstile during sing-up can slow them down?

Anyway, Twillio really dropped the ball on this problem, but why should they care as long as it keeps making them money?