T-Mobile confirmed that its new data breach, which affected some of its users, has been carried out by the cyber attackers using the sim swapping hacking scheme.
Pedestrians cross an intersection near a T-Mobile store on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan on July 26, 2019 in New York City. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice approved a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, the third and fourth largest companies in the U.S. The deal still has one more obstacle to overcome before becoming official; 13 states have filed a lawsuit to block the transaction.
T-Mobile New Data Breach
As per the news story by BleepingComputer, an unnamed spokesperson of the United States carrier, T Mobile, confirmed to the news outlet that "a very small number of customers " has been affected by its latest data breach.
On Dec. 28, T-Mobile has reportedly suffered another cyberattack, which exposed the data of its customers.
It was noted then that the latest data breach is less severe than the massive hacking incident last August, at least in terms of the number of affected users.
On top of that, initial reports also said that the scheme behind the latest hacking has yet to be confirmed.
However, a report from T-Mo suggested that there are three possible scenarios. It could be a SIM card swapping scheme, a leak of the customer's proprietary network information, or the combination of the two.
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T-Mobile Data Breach and SIM Swapping
This time around, T-Mobile has already confirmed that hackers have used the SIM card swapping scheme to harvest the information of its customers.
To be more precise, the spokesperson of the carrier further said that they had already informed the affected users.
T-Mobile said that "the SIM card assigned to a mobile number on their account may have been illegally reassigned.
According to the news story by Engadget, T-Mobile further disclosed that there is a possibility that the attackers have seen "limited" account information from their victims.
On top of that, the German-based US telecom went on to share that SIM swapping schemes are "unfortunately a common industry-wide occurrence."
But still, the carrier claimed that they have already corrected and fixed the issue with their customers' SIM cards. What's more, T-Mobile assured that they are already placing more protective measures to avoid such an incident.
Bleeping Computer said in the same report that the spokesperson refused to divulge the number of affected users. Not to mention that T-Mobile kept mum when asked how the SIM Swapping attack was carried out.
As such, what we know so far are two things: there are "a very small number" of T-Mobile users who were affected by the latest hacking, and the SIM Swapping scheme was used to carry out the cyberattack.
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Written by Teejay Boris
