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Reduce risks of user sign-up fraud and SMS pumping with Amazon Cognito user pools
- Amazon Cognito is a managed OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider (IdP) that you can use to add self-service sign-up, sign-in, and control access features to your web and mobile applications.
- SMS pumping is when bad actors purchase a block of high-rate phone numbers from a telecom provider and then coerces unsuspecting services into sending SMS messages to those numbers.
- In this blog post, we explore how SMS pumping may be perpetrated and options to reduce risks, including blocking unexpected user registration, detecting anomalies, and responding to risk events with your Cognito user pool.
- Implementing bot mitigation techniques, such as CAPTCHA, can be very effective in preventing simple bots from pumping user creation flows.
- You can validate the user provided phone number in the backend to catch incorrectly formatted phone numbers and add logic to help filter out unwanted phone numbers prior to sending text messages.
- Another layer of mitigation is to identify the actor’s phone number early in your application’s sign-up process.
- You can also choose to deliver an OTP using other methods, such as email, especially if your application doesn’t require the user’s phone number.
- By implementing these strategies, you can enhance the security of your web and mobile applications and help to safeguard your services from potential abuse and financial loss.
- We suggest that you apply a combination of these prevention, detection, and mitigation approaches to protect your Cognito user pools.
- It’s essential to continually review the effectiveness of these rules to minimize the risk of blocking legitimate sources and make dynamic adjustments to the rules when you detect new bad actors and patterns.
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