T-Mobile Fourth Data Breach in Three Years

The American mobile operator T-Mobile reported another data leak, which became the fourth in a row in the past three years.

“Our cybersecurity team recently discovered and closed unauthorized access to some information associated with your T-Mobile accounts,” according to letters sent to operators to their subscribers.

T-Mobile turned to information security experts for help in investigating the incident. The investigation found that hackers gained access to subscriber data such as telephone numbers, the number of telephone lines connected to the account and, in some cases, information related to calls and collected by the telecom operator as part of standard procedures.

Attackers were unable to gain access to account names, physical and email addresses, financial data, social security numbers, taxpayer identification numbers, passwords and PINs, assures T-Mobile. Since no personal information was leaked, the company did not provide its customers with a free credit monitoring service, but simply notified them of the incident, as required by US law.

According to T-Mobile, the leak affected only 0.2% of subscribers - about 200 thousand. In this regard, the current incident does not look as large-scale as compared to the previous three leaks that took place in August 2018, November 2019, and March 2020.