T-Mobile may say it is getting better at preventing data breaches, but it’s not yet perfected the craft. The mobile network operator has announced it discovered yet another unauthorized intrusion, but unlike the previous incidents in which millions of people were affected, this time it seems hackers only stole data from around a thousand users.
In a notification letter sent to affected customers, the company said it spotted a system intrusion in March 2023:
“The measures we have in place to alert us to unauthorized activity worked as designed and we were able to determine that a bad actor gained access to limited information from a small number of T-Mobile accounts between late February and March 2023,” the letter reads.
Hundreds of victims
In total, 836 customers have had their sensitive data taken. The telecommunications giant said that different data types were stolen for different customers, but in general, here’s what was taken: Full customer names, contact information, account numbers and associated phone numbers, T-Mobile account PINs, Social Security Numbers, government IDs, dates of birth, balance due, and internal codes used by T-Mobile for customer account service.
This is still plenty of information that can be sold for profit on the black market, and used in identity theft (opens in new tab) campaigns.
To counter the threat, T-Mobile had reset account PINs for impacted customers, and offered free credit monitoring and identity theft detection services through Transunion myTrueIdentity.
BleepingComputer reached out to the company’s spokesperson for more details but they weren’t available for comment.
This is T-Mobile’s second data breach incident this year, following the January attack. At the time, the threat actors managed to abuse a vulnerable API to get away with sensitive data on 37 million customers. The breach occurred in November 2022, was spotted on January 5 and remedied within 24 hours.
Via: BleepingComputer (opens in new tab)