T-Mobile data breach – over a million customers affected
In November 2019, T-Mobile suffered a catastrophic data breach with over a million pre-paid customers’ personal data stolen.
T-Mobile were not forthcoming about the hack, refusing to provide supplementary information about the breach in its official account of the attack.
When asked, a T-Mobile representative indicated that less than 1.5 per cent of the company’s 75 million customers were affected.
According to the mobile company, the data stolen included names, phone numbers, billing addresses, account numbers, rates, plans and calling features. No financial or password data was taken.
They also said they discovered the attack early in November and shut it down “immediately” but would not answer whether it was on a public-facing or internal website or database.
In an email issued to the affected customers, T-Mobile said:
Dear Customer,
We want to let you know about an incident that we recently identified and quickly corrected that impacted some of your personal information.
Our Cybersecurity team discovered and shut down malicious, unauthorized access to some information related to your T-Mobile prepaid wireless account. We promptly reported this to authorities. None of your financial data (including credit card information) or social security numbers was involved, and no passwords were compromised.
The data accessed was information associated with your prepaid service account, including name and billing address (if you provided one when you established your account), phone number, account number, rate plan and features, such as whether you added an international calling feature. Rate plan and features of your voice calling service are “customer proprietary network information” (“CPNI”) under FCC rules, which require we provide you notice of this incident.
We take the security of your information very seriously and have a number of safeguards in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access. We truly regret that this incident occurred and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
Our expertise with data breaches
Hayes Connor is home to one of the largest team of data breach claims specialists in the country. With a wealth of experience and an excellent track record of success, we can guide clients through dealing with any situation where personal data has been lost, stolen or otherwise exposed.
If your data has been exposed or potentially exposed in a data breach, you can take a look at our guide to what to do if your data has been stolen in a data breach.
You can find out more about our expertise and how we handle data breach claims here.
To see how we can help with a data breach, you can use our online claim form or speak to a member of our team by calling 0151 363 5895.