Mobile telecommunications company T-Mobile said on Friday that hackers had accessed data of another 5.3 million wireless customers, which included address, date of birth, and phone numbers. This comes just a few days after the company reported a data breach of more than 40 million former and prospective customers, along with data from 7.8 million existing T-Mobile wireless customers.
T-Mobile’s data breach saga started on Sunday after U.S.-based digital media outlet Vice brought it to the company’s notice that a seller had posted on an underground forum offering for sale some private data, including social security numbers from a breach at T-Mobile servers. Vice said the seller claimed that 100 million people had their data compromised in the breach. The seller was offering data of 30 million people for 6 Bitcoin, or around $270,000.
T-Mobile said that it was unaware of the breach until it was reported by U.S.-based digital media outlet Vice. This led to the still ongoing investigation which revealed the matter to be true.
In a statement, which was released on Monday, the company said that “we have been working around the clock to investigate claims being made that T-Mobile data may have been illegally accessed. We have determined that unauthorized access to some T-mobile data occurred, however, we have not yet determined that there is any personal customer data involved. We are confident that the entry point used to gain access has been closed, and we are continuing our deep technical review of the situation across our systems to identify the nature of any data that was illegally accessed”.
On Wednesday, T-Mobile said that an investigation into a cyberattack on its systems revealed that the personal data, including social security numbers and driver’s license information, of more than 40 million former and prospective customers, had been stolen. The stolen files also included data from 7.8 million existing T-Mobile wireless customers.
Information such as dates of birth, first and last names was also stolen; T-mobile said but added that there was no indication of their financial details being compromised.
Although data hacks are not new, T-Mobile’s hack is especially a big deal because of the amount of information that was stolen. The data breach of T-Mobile, which had 104.8 million customers as of June, is the latest high-profile cyber attack as digital thieves take advantage of security weakened by work-from-home policies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The latest hack shows how data breaches can affect both companies expose their customers to danger.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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