T-Mobile is the latest company suffering from a major security incident. In all, 47 million customers have been compromised.
While Canada may have forgotten about privacy reform, the security incidences continue to roll on. This time, cell phone carrier, T-Mobile, is the latest victim of a major data breach. In all, 47 million current and former customers have had their information compromised.
From Yahoo! News:
T-Mobile has confirmed that millions of current and former customers had their information stolen in a data breach, following reports of a hack over the weekend.
In a statement, T-Mobile, which has more than 100 million customers, said its preliminary analysis shows 7.8 million current postpaid T-Mobile customers had information taken in the data breach. The carrier said that some personal data was also taken, including customer names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license information for a “subset” of current and former postpay customers and prospective T-Mobile customers.
The company also said that 40 million records of former and prospective customers was taken, but that “no phone numbers, account numbers, PINs, passwords, or financial information were compromised.”
But the company warned that approximately 850,000 active T-Mobile customer names, phone numbers and account PINs were in fact compromised, and that customer names, phone numbers and account PINs were exposed. T-Mobile said it has reset those customer PINs. T-Mobile said it was “recommending all postpaid customers” to proactively change their account PIN, which protects their accounts from SIM-swapping attacks.
Vice reported this weekend that T-Mobile was investigating a possible hack after a seller on a known criminal forum claimed to be in possession of millions of records. The seller told Vice they had 100 million records on T-Mobile customers, which included customer account names, phone numbers and the IMEI numbers of phones on the account.
Sadly, this isn’t the first security incident reported from T-Mobile. In 2019, T-Mobile suffered from another data breach. At the time, over 1 million customers were compromised. As a result, this is, at least, the second time we’ve seen T-Mobile getting their customers information exposed to hackers.
If anything, this latest incident highlights the importance of having strong privacy protections. On one side of the spectrum is Europe that actually has decent powers to go after negligent companies. On the other side of the spectrum is Canada which, to this day, only has the power to send strongly worded letters (which can be shredded with no real consequence). Because of that, for every data breach that occurs, Canada will continue to be horribly unprepared to deal with the situation. After all, Europe has had these laws for 3 years, what’s Canada’s problem?
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
