It was recently revealed that T-Mobile US and MetroPCS were the latest in an ever-increasing line of major organisations such as Equifax, which we covered in a previous blog, the NHS and many more to have suffered a major data breach in the last year.
This data breach was confirmed following a recent statement released by the two companies stating that a potential security breach had been revealed on August 20th when hackers, who were part of an international group, accessed company servers through an API which was discovered and quickly shut down.
Despite the fact that no financial information or social security numbers were revealed to the hackers, some personal details could have been exposed such as name, billing zip code, telephone number, email address, account number and account type.
A company spokesperson for T-Mobile US told Vice magazine’s tech new offshoot Motherboard that the breach had affected “about” or “slightly less than” 3% of its 77 million customers.
Despite providing an estimate range of the customers affected by the data breach, the spokesperson added that she could not disclose the exact figure.
Furthermore, in the statement posted on the company website T-Mobile stated the following “Our cyber-security team discovered and shut down an unauthorized access to certain information, including yours, and we promptly reported it to authorities. None of your financial data (including credit card information) or social security numbers were involved, and no passwords were compromised”
“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 are so sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.”
As to whether any UK customers were affected by this data breach, EE, which absorbed T-Mobile's UK operations confirmed to the Register that no UK customers were affected.
If your business is looking to protect itself from potential data breaches then get in touch with Advantage today to discuss how we can help your business to become Cyber Security certified, how we can secure your data in Microsoft Azure or if you want to discuss any other security solutions.
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