02 Oct Hackers just stole data on 15 million T-Mobile customers
If you ever applied for device financing or service from T-Mobile anytime in the last two years, your personal information might have been stolen by hackers.
T-Mobile says as many as 15 million people may have been affected by the data breach, an attack that didn’t compromise T-Mobile’s own systems but rather those of its credit partner — the data vendor and credit bureau Experian. To be clear, the hack hurts even non-subscribers to T-Mobile — credit applicants who for whatever reason ultimately went with another service.
Experian says no credit card or banking data was stolen as part of the attack, which began in September 2013 and wasn’t discovered until two years later, on Sept. 15.
But just because your financial information may be safe doesn’t necessarily mean the rest of your personal information is secure: names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates and driver’s license and passport numbers were all leaked. Some of this data was encrypted, but Experian’s encryption may have been compromised, according to T-Mobile.
T-Mobile is offering two years of free credit monitoring to those who think they may have been affected. But it’s no small irony to note that the credit monitoring service is being provided by none other than Experian itself.