T-Mobile Hit With Data Breach, But There’s Good News

Another data breach has hit another major mobile provider, news that leaves most every mobile payments user quaking in their collective boots. The good news about this particular data breach, which hit T-Mobile, is that for the most part, the collective doesn’t need to even worry, because the breach affected just three percent of T-Mobile’s customer base.

The comparatively low spread of the breach was one light amid the darkness on this one, and there’s actually further good news besides. The cybersecurity team at T-Mobile spotted the breach and shut it down the same day—August 20—and a report to the authorities followed directly after. The hackers didn’t get financial information, reports from the company noted—Social Security numbers and passwords were also safe—but “some personal information” may have been compromised. This information includes names, billing zip codes, phone numbers and similar.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, released a statement that noted “Out of an abundance of caution, we wanted to let you know about an incident that we recently handled that may have impacted some of your personal information. We take the security of your information very seriously and have a number of safeguards in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access. We truly regret that this incident occurred and are so sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.”

Recent reports from Kaspersky Lab point out the costs of a data breach are only going up for businesses; the average hit to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is now $120,000, while enterprises are on the hook for $1.23 million on average.

So, as data breaches go, the news is about as good as it can get. A breach did happen, but it was fairly small in scope, pretty readily contained, spotted early, and T-Mobile followed up rapidly with alerts. The information taken was largely the same as can be found in your average phone book, and the likelihood of this actually hurting end users is fairly slim.

Data breaches are inevitable. It is no longer a matter of if, but rather when, one will strike. Thus the only thing left is to plan for it. T-Mobile has shown us the value of good planning here, and future data breaches may want to take a page or two from its book.