T-Mobile and its subsidiary MetroPCS today disclosed a recent incident where hackers gained "unauthorized access to certain information" of its customers, which the companies have already reported to the police and shut down. The security breach occurred earlier this week on Monday, August 20, and affected two million customers (via Motherboard).
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T-Mobile promises that no financial data, credit card information, social security numbers, or passwords were compromised in the breach. However, "some of your personal information may have been exposed," the company states in the letter shared online, including one or more of the following: name, billing zip code, phone number, email address, account number, and account type (prepaid or postpaid).
A T-Mobile spokesperson says that the security breach affected "slightly less than" three percent of its 77 million customers, but did not reference a specific number. The incident reportedly happened "early in the morning" on August 20, and was perpetrated by hackers part of "an international group" that accessed T-Mobile servers through an API that "didn't contain any financial data or other very sensitive data."
The intrusion was discovered by T-Mobile's cybersecurity team the same day:
“We found it quickly and shut it down very fast,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said she couldn’t give “specifics” of the attack and did not know whether the hackers were criminals or part of a government.
T-Mobile is reaching out to victims directly via text message to notify them, she said.
T-Mobile is now reaching out to notify all affected customers, and "if you don't receive a notification then that means your account was not among those impacted by this incident." The breach occurred less than a week after T-Mobile announced its new customer service initiative "Team of Experts."
Top Rated Comments
Here’s a great idea, stop centralizing databases.
Not being a physical asset this would not apply. If you can see the records from a single machine it does not matter where they are stored. It would not make sense to have multiple systems for customer data, the agents alone would take a lot of time trying to find the user. So, option two is better management of access.Decentralize the customer information so they have direct access.
That wau when a hacker comes around, it’s not just one or two targets with MILLIONS of person info, instead they would need to target one person at a time
Here’s a great idea, stop centralizing databases.
There's no solution that's hacker-proof. A script can be written to pull the data of one customer and re-run a million times automatically to pull the data of all the others.Decentralize the customer information so they have direct access.
That wau when a hacker comes around, it’s not just one or two targets with MILLIONS of person info, instead they would need to target one person at a time
I hope whoever steals my identity enjoys the student loan debt!
Here is how that would work:
[LIST=1]
* The news are out that T-Mobile servers have been compromised, and that a small fraction of subscribers will receive an email warning them that they may have been the target.
* You receive such email. The email appears to be authentic; but it is not and yet it appears crafted by T-Mobile Customer Service.
* It includes within the email body an embedded URL requesting you, the recipient, to click and login onto your T-Mobile account, and "change your password".
* The URL is fake, and points to hackers' backend servers.
* Unaware, you click and "login" with your login credentials.
* Presto, your credentials are now on the wild, and you have given the hackers a free pass to your T-Mobiel account, and posible financial information.
So beware.
Never click on embedded URLs within the body of emails.
Decentralize the customer information so they have direct access.
That wau when a hacker comes around, it’s not just one or two targets with MILLIONS of person info, instead they would need to target one person at a time