Mobile telecommunications company T-Mobile reported a second data breach in 2023, affecting 836 users, which saw the company offer affected users two years of free theft detection services.
The company via a notification letter issued to impacted customers on April 28th disclosed that a hacker managed to gain access to the information of its customers, which includes full names, date of birth, social security numbers, government IDs, addresses, contact information, and T-Mobile account pins.
In the letter, T-Mobile stated that no personal financial information or call records of customers were accessed in the breach, noting that it has proactively reset the account pins of affected users which customers use to verify their identity in order to make account changes.
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The letter reads,
“Our systems recently detected that a bad actor accessed limited information from a small number of T-Mobile accounts, including your T-Mobile account PIN. Personal financial account information and call records were not affected. Our systems and policies enabled T-Mobile teams to identify the activity, terminate it and implement measures to protect against it from occurring again in the future. To further protect your account, we have already proactively reset your pin.
“While we have a number of safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized access such as this from happening, we recognize that we must continue to make improvements to stay ahead of bad actors. We take these issues seriously. We apologize that this happened and are furthering efforts to enhance security of your information. We take these issues seriously. To protect your account, we proactive of reset your Mobile account pin. We are offering you two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft detection services, provided by myTrueIdentity from Transunion.”
T-mobile has therefore urged all its customers to review their account information and update their pin to a new one of their choice. They are also advised to remain vigilant by monitoring account activity and free credit reports, and reviewing their security choices on their email, financial and other accounts. Customers are also encouraged to use features that T-Mobile offers which include Account Takeover protection, number transfer pins, two-step verification, free scam protection with Scam Shield, SIM protection, a security dashboard and more.
This is the second incident T-Mobile has reported since the start of the year, with the previous data breach occurring on January 19, after hackers stole personal information of 37 million customers by abusing a vulnerable Application Programming Interface (API) in November 2022. Since 2018, the telecommunications company has reported nine data breaches.