There is a scary new reality that mobile phone numbers are now being used against users. As the popularity of two-factor authentication has grown, hackers quickly learned how to compromise a mobile phone number to gain access to all kinds of personal information – resulting in about $2.3 billion in account takeover fraud in 2016. Since two-factor authentication is becoming obsolete, users must turn to other solutions to protect personal information.

Armin Ebrahimi, founder & CEO of ShoCard, sat down with Inside Counsel to discuss multifactor authentication and the protection that storage on the blockchain provides to users. ShoCard is a digital identity verification system that protects consumer privacy through its use of blockchain data layer, eliminates the need for usernames and passwords. Using multi-factor authentication in conjunction with storage on the blockchain, it protects users' identities on a level that is unable to be compromised.

“Phone numbers are widely used as a second factor. While initially, this has been a great second factor, inevitably, hackers who want to access user accounts are drawn to exploit it and are finding new ways to exploit phone numbers,” he explained. “Since authentication systems have made a big bet on the security of phone numbers as the second factor, it provides the greatest opportunity for hackers to get in.”