T-Mobile Hacker Exposes 37m Customers' Personal Data

Uploaded on 2023-01-21 in TECHNOLOGY--Hackers, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms

T-Mobile has revealed yet another large scale data breach when, over a month ago, a hacker accessed a mass of personal data belonging to 37 million US customers. This is the company’s second major cyber breach in less than two years.

In a statement T-Mobile said that a “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan features,” since November 25.

T-Mobile said no social security numbers, credit card information, government ID numbers, passwords, PINs or financial information were exposed in the hack.

In a formal statement to the US SEC financial regulator, T-Mobile said it detected the breach more than a month later, on January 5, and that within a day it had fixed the problem that the hacker was exploiting. The hackers, according to T-Mobile, didn’t breach any company system, but rather abused an application programming interface, or API.

“Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network,” the company wrote. “We understand that an incident like this has an impact on our customers and regret that this occurred. While we, like any other company, are unfortunately not immune to this type of criminal activity, we plan to continue to make substantial, multi-year investments in strengthening our cybersecurity program,” says T-Mobile.

The company, which is a leading mobile network operator worldwide, with110 million US customers has begun a “substantial, multi-year investment” in 2021 to improve its cyber security capabilities and protections.

While this is the first breach disclosed by T-Mobile in 2023, the mobile carrier has disclosed seven other data breaches since 2018, including one where attackers gained access to the data of roughly 3% of all its worldwide customer data.

T-Mobile: SEC: Reuters: CNN: Techcrunch: The Verge: Bleeping Computer: Image: Unsplash

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