[BreachExchange] T-Mobile welcomed Christmas with its second data breach in less than six months

[Terrell Byrd]

https://www.phonearena.com/news/t-mobile-christmas-data-breach-leaked-documents_id137443

T-Mobile may have enjoyed another solid year in terms of subscriber growth,
5G network expansion, speed boosts, and various other technological
breakthroughs and advancements, but when it comes to customer support and
especially security, 2021 has been a time of worrying decline and a tidal
wave of negative publicity for the once mighty "Un-carrier."

While the huge data breach identified back in August is likely to remain
unrivaled (in the worst possible sense of the word) in the wireless
industry for many years to come, T-Mo customers will undoubtedly be
disappointed to hear their mobile network operator has recently experienced
another bout of "unauthorized activity." Yes, already.

The good news is the account information viewed without authorization and
presumably stolen this time around is not quite as extensive as during the
previous breach, with no social security numbers, birth dates, or personal
identification data compromised in any way, at least to Magenta's current
(leaked) knowledge.

The even better news is the number of people impacted by the latest
cyberattack seems to be a lot smaller than the tens of millions of current,
former, and prospective T-Mobile subscribers that had to suffer the
consequences of the carrier's negligence just a few months ago.

On the not so bright side of things, those who did have their accounts
breached sometime over the last few weeks should be extremely worried of
how their personal information has or will be unlawfully used in the
future.

We're talking a "small number of customers" with billing account names,
phone numbers, numbers of active lines, account numbers, rate plan names
and MRCs (monthly recurring charges) compromised, as well as another "small
number of customers" whose SIM cards were changed without permission.

Worse yet, a presumably smaller separate group of T-Mobile customers were
impacted by both attack types, suffering a so-called SIM swap and losing
control of all that personal info listed above with potentially
catastrophic consequences.

For what it's worth, T-Mo did apparently reverse all the SIM swap incidents
while notifying every single affected customer, which makes it a little
weird that the new breach doesn't seem to be publicly acknowledged in any
way, at least at the time of this writing.

Unfortunately, these small-scale incidents are actually pretty frequent
occurrences in this day and age, but of course, T-Mobile will have to live
with being scrutinized a little closer than usual for a while after this
year's completely unprecedented hack.
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