T-Mobile Hack Affects 47 Million Users — How To Know If You’re Included

T-Mobile has just confirmed the details of a massive data breach — saying that personal information for more than 47 million people is now at risk. In a world of constantly connected devices, protecting personal information is at top of mind for many people. By using safe passwords, two-factor authentication, and only doing business with companies that can be trusted, there are ways to mitigate the chances of having sensitive info compromised.

Even for the safest of people, unfortunately, there are still instances where bad things can happen. This past April, Facebook announced that 533 million users had their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other data leaked. T-Mobile also found itself in the news back in January, where a ‘security incident’ leaked confidential data for around 0.2-percent of the carrier’s subscriber base.

Fast forward to August 2021, and T-Mobile is faced with yet another incident — albeit one that’s much more serious. On August 18, the carrier announced that over 47 million have had their data compromised due to a “highly sophisticated cyberattack against T-Mobile systems.” T-Mobile says it learned about the incident last week, “immediately began an exhaustive investigation into these claims,” and then closed the access point that was used to access its servers.

How To Know If You’re Affected By This T-Mobile Breach

Among the 47 million individuals impacted by this breach, around 7.8 million are people with a postpaid T-Mobile plan. This includes something like T-Mobile One, T-Mobile Magenta, etc. The remaining 40 million includes anyone who applied for credit at T-Mobile — including former and prospective customers. Even more troubling is the type of data that was leaked. For anyone included in that group of over 47 million, T-Mobile says all of the following are at risk: first and last names, date of birth, social security number, and driver’s license/personal ID. To make matters worse, approximately 850,000 customers on T-Mobile prepaid plans had their names, phone numbers, and account PINs leaked.

To say the very least, this is a scary situation for anyone who might be impacted. T-Mobile says communications will be “issued shortly” with an explanation to all of its customers about what happened. The account PINs for the 850,000 prepaid customers have already been reset, but T-Mobile recommends all postpaid customers do the same. There’s no evidence of PINs being stolen for postpaid users, but it’s a cautionary step to keep everyone as safe as possible. This can be done by visiting the T-Mobile website or calling 611 from a T-Mobile device. T-Mobile postpaid customers are also getting an option to protect their accounts with Account Takeover Protection — which T-Movile says “makes it harder for customer accounts to be fraudulently ported out and stolen.” Lastly, T-Mobile is “immediately” offering two free years of McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service.

For anyone who thinks they may be among the 47 million people, there’s not much to be done at this point. Using McAfee or another identity protection service is a smart move to (hopefully) catch any fraudulent activity before it gets too serious. It’s also a good idea for postpaid customers to change their account PIN, and to make sure a strong password and 2FA system back other online accounts. That may sound a bit dire, but it’s how these things go. The information is out there, there’s no way to get it back, so it’s up to everyone else to ensure it isn’t used against them. Considering this isn’t the first breach T-Mobile’s faced in 2021, expect the reaction to this whole thing to be (rightfully) critical.

Source: T-Mobile

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Joe Maring
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Joe has been actively writing and talking about consumer tech since 2012. His biggest passion lies with smartphones, but he’s happy to talk your ear off about just about anything with a CPU. He lives in Kalamazoo, MI with his wife, two cats, and pit bull/boxer mix.

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