T-Mobile cyberattack impacts current and former customers

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The past few days, T-Mobile has been in security news thanks to a rumor claiming a data breach at the company. T-Mobile confirmed that data breach the next day, and today they’re calling it a full cyberattack. T-Mobile isn’t the first to fall victim to a cyberattack, but this is a significant one.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

The company is calling this a “sophisticated cyberattack,” affecting approximately 7.8 million current T-Mobile postpaid customer accounts. The company has also said that 40 million former or “prospective” customers are affected as well.

T-Mobile issued a statement saying, “we are taking immediate steps to help protect all of the individuals who may be at risk from this cyberattack.” This is what the company’s press release had to say about the cyberattack;

  • Late last week we were informed of claims made in an online forum that a bad actor had compromised T-Mobile systems. We immediately began an exhaustive investigation into these claims and brought in world-leading cybersecurity experts to help with our assessment.
  • We then located and immediately closed the access point that we believe was used to illegally gain entry to our servers.
  • Yesterday, we were able to verify that a subset of T-Mobile data had been accessed by unauthorized individuals. We also began coordination with law enforcement as our forensic investigation continued.
  • While our investigation is still underway and we continue to learn additional details, we have now been able to confirm that the data stolen from our systems did include some personal information.
  • We have no indication that the data contained in the stolen files included any customer financial information, credit card information, debit or other payment information.
  • Some of the data accessed did include customers’ first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for a subset of current and former postpay customers and prospective T-Mobile customers. 
  • Our preliminary analysis is that approximately 7.8 million current T-Mobile postpaid customer accounts’ information appears to be contained in the stolen files, as well as just over 40 million records of former or prospective customers who had previously applied for credit with T-Mobile. Importantly, no phone numbers, account numbers, PINs, passwords, or financial information were compromised in any of these files of customers or prospective customers.

T-Mobile is attempting to help those who this cyberattack has impacted by offering some help; the press release went on to say:

  • Immediately offering 2 years of free identity protection services with McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service.
  • Recommending all T-Mobile postpaid customers proactively change their PIN by going online into their T-Mobile account or calling our Customer Care team by dialing 611 on your phone. This precaution is despite the fact that we have no knowledge that any postpaid account PINs were compromised.
  • Offering an extra step to protect your mobile account with our Account Takeover Protection capabilities for postpaid customers, which makes it harder for customer accounts to be fraudulently ported out and stolen.
  • Publishing a unique web page later on Wednesday for one stop information and solutions to help customers take steps to further protect themselves. 

The company is still investigating, but this is a pretty serious breach, and you should keep an eye out for an email from T-Mobile if you think you’ve been impacted.

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cyberattack at T-Mobile
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