While using a different password for each account is one of the basic principles of digital security, if you sometimes recycle passwords, you should also change the passwords on other accounts that have the same credentials used on your T-Mobile account. 20, the wait to talk to a representative was 45 minutes. While password information doesn’t seem to have been affected by the T-Mobile breach, the company is suggesting that customers change their passwords by logging in to their accounts or calling customer service by dialing 611 on their cell phones, although as of the morning of Friday, Aug. You’ll need to lift the freeze temporarily when you want to give a company access to your credit information-say, if you’re applying for a credit card or a car loan, or you want to rent an apartment.īeef up your password game. Before the pandemic, each offered a single free report annually and charged $20 for additional reports. It requires contacting each of the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.īecause of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the bureaus are offering free weekly credit reports through April 20, 2022. That makes it difficult for identity thieves to open new accounts in your name. There’s no easy way to prevent a thief from using your Social Security number or your driver’s license number, but there are things you can do to limit the impact of having such personal info exposed to criminals.įreeze your credit. Law firms have filed a class-action suit against T-Mobile in Washington state seeking compensatory damages, reimbursement of out‐of‐pocket costs, improvements to T-Mobile’s data security systems, future annual audits, and adequate credit monitoring. T-Mobile has been hit with five smaller cyberattacks since 2018, the largest exposing some personal information of around 2 million users. The company is also beefing up its Account Takeover Protections in the wake of the breach. (See below for details on how to do that.) T-Mobile is recommending that all postpaid customers proactively change their PINs just to be safe. The company said it will offer two years of free McAfee identity protection services to affected customers. The page does not offer a way to determine whether your account is one of those affected by the breach. T-Mobile has created a web page with up-to-date information and remedies for consumers. Unauthorized access should have triggered an alarm.” “This was a lot of data for a lot of customers. “If it’s true, it’s a treasure trove of personally identifiable information,” says Rick Tracy, chief security officer at Telos, a cybersecurity firm based in Virginia. The vulnerability that let criminals gain access to the data has been fixed, according to T-Mobile.Įarlier reporting put the number of affected accounts at 100 million, with the tech site Motherboard reporting that criminals claimed to have accessed and copied data including Social Security numbers and other sensitive data such as the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers that serve as a phone’s digital fingerprint.Īccording to Motherboard, which had seen a sample of the information stolen in the breach, the thieves put a subset of the data up for sale on the web with an asking price of approximately $270,000 in bitcoin, which caught the attention of the site’s editors. However, their phone numbers, account numbers, PINs, passwords, and financial information were not compromised, the company said. The stolen data on other T-Mobile customers included their first and last names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license/ID information. (No Metro by T-Mobile, former Sprint prepaid, or Boost customers had that info revealed.) T-Mobile has proactively reset the PINs on those accounts. T-Mobile says preliminary analysis of the breach indicates that the stolen files contained account information from approximately 850,000 T-Mobile prepaid customers and 7.8 million regular monthly customers, as well as more than 40 million records related to former or prospective customers who had applied for credit with T-Mobile, a company spokesperson said in an e-mail to Consumer Reports.įor the prepaid customers, the exposed data included names, phone numbers, and account PINs, the company said. According to T-Mobile, criminals acquired the personal data of almost 50 million consumers. Cell phone carrier T-Mobile has rolled out new tools, including free identity protection services, to help customers affected by a large data breach.
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