NOT ALL DATA breaches are created equal. None of them are good, but they do come in varying degrees of bad. And given how regularly they happen, it’s understandable that you may have become inured to the news. Still, a T-Mobile breach that hackers claim involved the data of 100 million people deserves your attention, especially if you’re a customer of the “un-carrier.”
As first reported by Motherboard on Sunday, someone on the dark web claims to have obtained the data of 100 million from T-Mobile’s servers and is selling a portion of it on an underground forum for 6 bitcoin, about $280,000. The trove includes not only names, phone numbers, and physical addresses but also more sensitive data like social security numbers, driver’s license information, and IMEI numbers, unique identifiers tied to each mobile device. Motherboard confirmed that samples of the data “contained accurate information on T-Mobile customers.”