T-Mobile suffered a security breach in December that may have exposed information related to calls and phone numbers for some of its customers. First reported by Biping Computer, the information affected by the breach not include names in customer accounts, physical or e-mail addresses, financial data, credit card information, social security numbers, tax IDs, passwords or PINs, the company said.
T-Mobile said in a statement sent to The Verge which notified “less than 0.2 percent” of its customers – which works for some 200,000 people – that some account information may have been accessed illegally. This information “may have included phone numbers, number of lines signed and, in a small number of cases, some call-related information collected as part of normal operation and service”. T-Mobile says it “identified this attack in early December and quickly stopped the incident”. Affected customers were notified via text message.
In a notice on its website, T-Mobile said its security team “blocked malicious and unauthorized access” and started an investigation to determine what information was involved. The company reported the situation to federal authorities.
T-Mobile has been the victim of several data breaches in recent years; in 2018, hackers accessed the personal information of nearly 2 million customers, including names, addresses and account numbers. In 2019, some of the company’s prepaid customers were affected by a breach that accessed names, addresses and account numbers. And in March 2020, a breach exposed some financial information, social security numbers and other account information for some T-Mobile customers.