For the second time in year 2020, the servers of T-Mobile were infiltrated by hackers who later accessed some customers’ information related to the subsidiary of German Telecom Company Deutsche Telekom AG.
An investigation launched at the end of Dec’2020 revealed that the threat actors entered the servers and siphoned data related to customer proprietary network info like phone numbers, the accounts linked to the phone numbers, calls placed, messages sent to/from the mobile number and time and duration of calls made through the number.
T-Mobile claims that the cyber crooks only siphoned data related to phone numbers and did not access records such as the names, email addresses and physical addresses linked to the phone number, financial data, payment card data, social security numbers, tax IDs and passwords/PINs.
Security experts feel that often such data leaks might lead to social engineering attacks and phishing attempts and might spell deep trouble to a few of T-Mobile customers in the future.
Note 1- Out of a subscriber base of 100 million, only 0.2% of them were targeted in the attack and that accounts to 200,000 on a potential note.
Note 2- In November 2019, some data related to prepaid customers was accessed by hackers and that includes info such as customer names, addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, rate plans and billing data. Again on March 4th,2020 the company claimed that cyber fraudsters hacked its database and stole financial data such as social security numbers and other account information.
