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Not sure what happened to this week's Friday Fun thread? Are these manually posted instead of automated? Anyway, was going to throw this on the fun thread--
Does Chipotle have real, legitimate reason to enforce 2FA on its customers? And is it at all possible there is non-security motivation behind its phone requirement?
I don't recall exactly when the change was implemented, but think it was sometime earlier this year, when, as an existing customer, I was forced to add a phone number to my account. I forgot about it until now, when I was logging into the website, and it texted me a code that I needed to enter. This was the same device I've previously logged on, with the same IP etc. Nothing suspicious that would warrant more stringent security.
Worst of all, it's not an option to disable it. The accounts/profiles section, under 2FA, just shows a sentence that says they use it to enhance security. So no way to opt out. And of course, a phone number is required on the account, so you can't remove it and somehow force 2FA to go through email. Granted, those using mobile apps are presumed to have a phone number, but for those ordering on the website, couldn't it be argued that the company "discriminates" against, uh, vulnerable, low-income populations who don't own phones? Cue Diablo Immortal no-phones meme.
Googling Chipotle and 2FA, there are a couple of Reddit threads that claim their accounts were hacked, and somehow a hacker ordered $60 or $120 worth of food through their app. I have no idea if these examples of being "hacked" is truly a matter of Chipotle's back end being compromised, or just someone whose credentials were phished, a reused password sold on the dark web, or a lost or stolen phone being used. My prior is it's overwhelmingly the latter and not the former.
My suspicion, therefore, is Chipotle wants to collect customer phone numbers for marketing or business intelligence purposes, and to ensure universal compliance, tacks on a security label. That, or their CISO is an idiot who thinks heavy-handed policies (reminiscent of password policies that require special characters and thus go against the probably-more-secure use of passphrases) are the only path to security. I would have no problem with a bank or work email enforcing 2FA, but I do have a problem for being required to do the same for a burrito joint. Unfortunately for me, there is no real recourse--I like their food still, and boycotting will realistically hurt me more than them, not to mention will unlikely signal to the higher ups that their so-called security policy is losing customer goodwill.
And it's death by a thousand cuts. With all the data breaches, protecting your SSN and birth dates seem increasingly futile. At some point random mobile games will require you to authenticate with phone numbers and maybe mailing addresses "for security purposes", and we'll all be too numb to notice anything unusual.
No and no. Or rather, there is a vanishingly small chance they have a good reason for any of this.
Given the fact that the majority of purchases will be through the mobile app (i.e. most likely the same device receiving the 2FA code as the one signing in and ordering), it's quite useless, actually. This is on top of the fact that SIM-based 2FA is horrendous for being extremely susceptible to social engineering, i.e., a random person calling up your phone company pretending to be you and have "lost" your SIM card, then obtaining access to it. (In contrast, TOTP 2FA does not have this vulnerability, but there's still not much to gain from using it here unless you have two phones).
If the backend is compromised, everyone's credentials are compromised, 2FA or not. Without knowing more details I can't say for sure, but it is likely their phones were simply stolen and the 2FA was useless because it went to the same device as the one signing in. Or it could be that people were phished to hand over not only their password but also the 2FA code for authentication (social engineering is surprisingly powerful and 99% of the time humans are the weak link in the system).
Your threat model is wrong. Here's the threat model:
https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/38246?context=8#context
Current attack: an attacker with 10k stolen CCs, 50%+ of which are already reported as stolen, and he's buying burritos to determine which ones are still live. This attacker is running a python script on his laptop and placing orders either with selenium in the browser or an android VM.
Effort:
python test_on_chipotle.py todays_batch.csvReward: 5k valid CCs.
Your proposed new attack: make 10,000 phone calls to either T-Mobile/actual Chipotle customers, perhaps half of which will be successful in convincing the customer to hand over the OTP.
Effort: 10k cold calls
Reward: 2.5k valid CCs.
Even assuming the 10k cold calls are still worth the effort to the scammer (they probably aren't), chipotle has just cut phony orders in half.
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