Major US carrier, T-Mobile, is admitting that they have suffered from a data breach. Over 1 million customers have had their information compromised.
As we enter the Back Friday week (month?), probably one of the last thing any company wants to have is a data breach. That is precisely what happened with T-Mobile. The compromised data affects prepaid data customers.
T-Mobile says that a malicious party was able to obtain unauthorized access to peoples information. The only good news in all of this is the fact that financial information wasn’t impacted. However, other pieces of information was. From Tech Radar:
The malicious actor was able to obtain the names, billing addresses, phone numbers, account numbers and rate plans and features purchased by T-Mobile’s prepaid data customers. The company provided more details on the data breach in a disclosure notice saying:
“Our Cybersecurity team discovered and shut down malicious, unauthorized access to some information related to your T-Mobile prepaid wireless account. We promptly reported this to authorities. None of your financial data (including credit card information) or social security numbers was involved, and no passwords were compromised.”
T-Mobile is alerting affected customers to notify them what happened. From Bleeping Computers:
“The data accessed was information associated with your prepaid service account, including name and billing address (if you provided one when you established your account), phone number, account number, rate plan and features, such as whether you added an international calling feature,” T-Mobile states.
“Rate plan and features of your voice calling service are “customer proprietary network information” (“CPNI”) under FCC rules, which require we provide you notice of this incident.”
We take the security of your information very seriously and have a number of safeguards in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access. We truly regret that this incident occurred and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. – T-Mobile
T-Mobile alerted all impacted customers via SMS notifications and encourages all those affected by this breach to confirm or update their PIN/passcode on their T-Mobile accounts as additional protection.
Users can reach out to Customer Care at 611 from T-Mobile phones or at 1-800-T-MOBILE from phones using any other carriers to request for assistance to deal with the situation or for special account handling instructions.
November has been an active month for security incidences. On the first of the month, we noted how the Desjardins data breach worsened to include their entire customer base. After that, we more recently were able to cover the 1.2 billion people affected by a recently discovered data leak.
This latest breach simply continues the long running saga of security incidences. What will be interesting to see is if any legal action will take place because of it. We’ll have to wait and see if that actually happens at this point.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
