The firm’s CEO has finally come up with an update about the breach that affected millions of T-Mobile customers. The CEO has confirmed the hacker brute forced the T-Mobile network for the security breach impacting 54.6 million customers.
T-Mobile Breach Update
In a recent update, the T-Mobile CEO has shared more details about the data breach that happened earlier this month.
Quickly overviewing the incident, T-Mobile admitted a breach after a hacker started selling its customers’ data on the dark web. The hacker claimed to have stolen over 100 million records from T-Mobile databases that included customers’ personal information.
At that time, T-Mobile didn’t share many details as it began the investigations. Then, in a subsequent update, the firm confirmed that the breach impacted 54.6 million customers.
Alongside presenting the breakdown of impacted customers’ information, they also offered free 2-year identity protection services to the affected users.
However, the details about the attack remained undisclosed then. Nonetheless, in the update from their CEO, Mike Sievert, it becomes evident that the firm had suffered an attack recently. While it didn’t impact customers’ financial information, it did affect the PII data.
Regarding the technical aspects of the attack strategy. The CEO explained that the attacker gained access to the company servers, followed by brute force attacks to access the databases. The firm has presently avoided sharing more details as they coordinate with law enforcement over the matter.
As per the statement,
In short, this individual’s intent was to break in and steal data, and they succeeded.
Alongside the investigations, the firm is also taking up more steps to prevent such incidents in the future. These include the roll-out of “Account Takeover Protection” for postpaid customers, recommending “Scam Shield” – T -Mobile’s free scam-blocking protection – to the new users, resetting passwords and PINs, and suggesting other best practices.
Also, T-Mobile has partnered with the cybersecurity Mandiant for the long term to improve its overall security status.