New T-Mobile Breach Affects 37 Million Accounts

upstart writes:

New T-Mobile Breach Affects 37 Million Accounts:

T-Mobile today disclosed a data breach affecting tens of millions of customer accounts, its second major data exposure in as many years. In a filing with federal regulators, T-Mobile said an investigation determined that someone abused its systems to harvest subscriber data tied to approximately 37 million current customer accounts.

In a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, T-Mobile said a "bad actor" abused an application programming interface (API) to hoover up data on roughly 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts. The data stolen included customer name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number, as well as information on the number of customer lines and plan features.

APIs are essentially instructions that allow applications to access data and interact with web databases. But left improperly secured, these APIs can be leveraged by malicious actors to mass-harvest information stored in those databases. In October, mobile provider Optus disclosed that hackers abused a poorly secured API to steal data on 10 million customers in Australia.

T-Mobile said it first learned of the incident on Jan. 5, 2023, and that an investigation determined the bad actor started abusing the API beginning around Nov. 25, 2022. The company says it is in the process of notifying affected customers, and that no customer payment card data, passwords, Social Security numbers, driver's license or other government ID numbers were exposed.

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