It's also a pain in the ass for the user. Creating a barrier to entry decreases the likelihood that your customers will use the service. I don't want to go find my phone to receive a text every time I want to log in to every single website.

The worst part of those is when they do support 2FA, but it's text-only. No app authentication or hardware key option.

Like it's something, but it's easily the least secure option, and probably the most expensive since it requires operating an additional SMS portal for those codes.

SMS 2fa on banks is not as bad as you’d think.

1. They settled on SMS before there really were choices, and banks are slow to change
2. Banks long since realized SMS was inadequate and use additional security. I imagine all banks in US, but certainly the biggest ones, invested in profiling software that looks at your behavior and device to rate every transaction by additional risk factors. They’re already pretty confident nothing bad is going on

As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.

In the case of banks, it's likely that;

• They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the "lowest common denominator" here, so they chose it.

• The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it

It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It's likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply "good enough"

Pornhub has better account security than my bank, which ONLY has an option for a 6-digit numeric password, with no 2fa at all

This one I can understand, if something somehow goes wrong with your 2FA you’re locked out of your money

I was going to mention the support aspect. I believe some TOTP 2FA applications have automatic online backups by default but some don't and require users to make their own backups. I can only imagine how challenging it would be to deal with users who have locked themselves out of their account due to their 2FA setup.

I had to go through that with itch.io a while back and had to verify my most recent purchases to recover my account. It was nice I was able to get it back but that in itself could be a security concern.

That’s a super useful site, thank you!