It’s a sad week to be a T-Mobile customer. Following reports from earlier this week about a potential breach, the mobile communications giant confirmed in a press release shared today that the company has indeed suffered from a sophisticated cyberattack. Millions of records have been taken.
More specifically, as many as 47.8 million records have made their way into the hands of hackers. What’s worse is that the information taken appears to be quite sensitive; T-Mobile mentioned that at least some of the data includes highly personal information such as social security numbers.
“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,” T-Mobile admitted.
T-Mobile is taking multiple steps to protect its customers and win their trust back. These include two free years of identity protection services with McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service, as well as a new web page that will instruct users on how to further protect themselves. Of course, postpaid customers have also been urged to change their PINs.
We take our customers’ protection very seriously and we will continue to work around the clock on this forensic investigation to ensure we are taking care of our customers in light of this malicious attack. While our investigation is ongoing, we wanted to share these initial findings even as we may learn additional facts through our investigation that cause the details above to change or evolve.
Source: T-Mobile