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BELLEVUE, Wash. (AP) — T-Mobile said it had notified nearly all of its millions of customers whose personal data had been stolen, and said it was “really sorry” for the breach.
CEO Mike Sievert In a written statement on Friday, he said the company has put a lot of effort into getting ahead of criminal hackers, “but we didn’t live up to the expectations we had ourselves to protect our customers.” Knowing that we couldn’t prevent this disclosure is one of the hardest parts of this event.”
The company announced earlier in August that the names, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses or other identifying information of more than 40 million people who applied for T-Mobile loans had been exposed in a recent data breach. The same data was also compromised for the approximately 7.8 million existing T-Mobile customers who pay monthly for phone service.
sievert‘s statement followed Thursday’s report in the Wall Street Journal, where 21-year-old American hacker John Binns, who lives in Turkey, told the newspaper he was responsible for the hack, blaming T-Mobile’s lax security for making it possible.
sievert He didn’t directly refer to Binns on Friday, but said, “in short, this person’s intent was to break in and steal data, and they succeeded.”
sievert He said the breach was under control, the investigation was “substantially complete,” and customer financial information was not disclosed. he He said T-Mobile has hired cybersecurity experts. mandiant assists the investigation and coordinates with law enforcement.
“What we can share is that, in the simplest terms, the bad actor leverages his knowledge of technical systems along with special tools and capabilities to access our test environments, and then use brute force attacks and other methods to break in to other IT servers containing customer data.” sievert Wrote.
sievert He said the company has notified “almost every” existing customer affected and is now doing the same for former customers and potential customers who may have provided some personal information when applying for an account. Unaffected customers will see a banner on their T-Mobile online account page informing them that their data has not been exposed.
Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, T-Mobile has become one of the nation’s largest cell phone service providers. AT&T and Verizon, after acquiring rival Sprint last year. It reported that it had a total of 102.1 million U.S. customers after the merger.
T-Mobile had previously disclosed a number of data breaches over the years, although the latest is the biggest. sievert He said the company is taking steps to improve its security.
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