Hacking My ISP Part 1: Exposing a Critical Bug Allowing SIM Swapping
In January 2023, I received an invitation to participate in a private bug bounty program for a popular ISP operating in the EMEA region. I’m familiar with them as I use their service on a daily basis.
While gathering subdomains of redacted.com, one caught my attention: sim-management.prod.redacted.com
. Knowing that this host is related to SIM card management, I asked ChatGPT to generate a wordlist for it and used tools like CeWL, crunch, and WordlistGPT.
I started directory brute-forcing using dirsearch while proxying it to Burp Suite to analyze the results using different methods like POST, PUT, etc. One directory, /cs/
, caught my attention as it returned a content length different from the other 404 pages. (If I hadn’t proxied dirsearch traffic to Burp Suite, I wouldn’t have noticed this.)
Subsequently, I began brute-forcing this directory and encountered an error with /cs/SimSwap
.
Being familiar with SOAP API, I knew that adding ?wsdl
would resolve this error.
I utilized Burp Suite’s WSDler extension to parse the above request.
By sending this request with the correct data, I was able to perform a SIM swap. Notably, no authentication was required for this request.
Kudos to them for promptly fixing this bug within 2 hours of my report.
Bounty: $15,000