The full scale of the impact on T-Mobile’s business is not yet clear. Besides, the company is unable to predict how the incident might change its customers’ behaviour.
American largest telecommunications company T-Mobile US Inc (NASDAQ: TMUS) is investigating a data breach that has affected as many as 37 million customers. According to the company, the hackers have been stealing the account data, including name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number, and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan feature, for more than a month. Such information as customer payment card information (PCI), social security numbers/tax IDs, driver’s licenses, passwords/PINs or other financial account information was not exposed.
Data Breach at T-Mobile
In the statement shared with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), T-Mobile commenced an investigation with external cybersecurity experts immediately after noticing that someone is obtaining data without authorization. The company has managed to trace the source of the malicious activity and stop it within 24 hours.
T-Mobile stated:
“We are continuing to diligently investigate the unauthorized activity. In addition, we have notified certain federal agencies about the incident, and we are concurrently working with law enforcement. Additionally, we have begun notifying customers whose information may have been obtained by the bad actor in accordance with applicable state and federal requirements.”
T-Mobile has also admitted that the full scale of the impact on its business is not yet clear. Besides, the company is unable to predict how the incident might change its customers’ behaviour. T-Mobile has also noted it might incur significant expenses in connection with the data breach.
The investigation is still going on.
Back in August 2021, T-Mobile suffered another hack attack that compromised the data of 76.6 million customers. Last year, the company agreed to pay $500 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that followed the cyberattack. This amount included a $350 million payment to members of the class action and its related legal costs. In addition, T-Mobile agreed to invest an additional $150 million to improve its data security and cybersecurity technology in 2022 and 2023. However, the recent data breach proves that the company failed to protect sensitive consumer data.
Hack Attacks in 2023
Last year, more than 4,100 publicly disclosed data breaches occurred. To name a few of them, the largest attacks were the Twitter attack that involved 5.4 million accounts, the WhatsApp attack where hackers tried to sell data of 500 million WhatsApp users on the dark web, and a crypto theft on Crypto.com exchange that targeted nearly 500 people’s cryptocurrency wallets.
Cyber attacks have been rated the fifth top-rated risk back in 2020. They have become the new norm across the public and private sectors. In 2023, we will see a growth in the number of cyber attacks, and analysts predict that by 2025, IoT cyber attacks alone are expected to double. According to a recent Cybersecurity Ventures report, the global annual cost of cybercrime is predicted to top $8 trillion. Therefore, businesses and individuals should make extra efforts not to become victims of bad actors.