The third-largest US wireless carrier had earlier this week
said that personal data of more than 40 million former and prospective
customers was stolen along with data from 7.8 million existing T-Mobile
wireless customers.
In its latest update, which comes days after the US Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) opened an investigation into the breach,
T-Mobile revealed it had identified 5.3 million additional wireless subscribers
who were impacted by the breach as well as 667,000 more accounts of former
customers.
The data includes addresses, dates of birth, and phone
numbers of customers, the company said, adding that it had no indication that
the accessed data contained financial information such as credit card or other
payment data.
Some T-Mobile customers sued the company for damages late
Thursday night in Seattle federal court, saying in a proposed class action that
the cyberattack violated their privacy and exposed them to a higher risk of
fraud and identity theft.
The wireless carrier is the latest victim of cyberattacks on
large corporations in the United States as hackers exploit weakened user system
privacy and security due to work-from-home policies instituted since the onset
of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2018, the company had informed about a potential security
breach that could have affected about 3 percent of its 77 million customers.
"T-mobile has had 6 other data breaches in the past 4
years," said Doug Schmidt, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt
University.
"It appears that their IT system is particularly
vulnerable since they haven't been able to rectify their known security issues
during this time period, which should be concerning to customers."
T-Mobile said in a regulatory filing on Friday that while
the investigation was ongoing, it was confident that it had "closed off
the access."
0 comments:
Post a Comment