Ever since T-Mobile learned of the cyberattack last week, they have been very vocal about the incident. They continued to give updates to their customers via their blog and even sent out a notification to affected customers. Today, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert has once again taken the time to reassure their customers and apologize for the breach.
In a blog post, Sievert revealed that the hacker was able to access the personal information of over 54 million current and former customers. The information accessed include their names, phone numbers, social security numbers, and addresses. The CEO, however, reiterated that their customers’ financial information was not accessed. There were also some business customers who were part of the attack.
The CEO used the platform to apologize and share the steps they are doing to prevent further attacks.
“Knowing that we failed to prevent this exposure is one of the hardest parts of this event. On behalf of everyone at Team Magenta, I want to say we are truly sorry.”
While the CEO can’t disclose too many details about the incident, they continue to work with law enforcement to impose a criminal investigation. But Sievert insisted that there is no longer a risk to customers from the breach.
“What we can share is that, in simplest terms, the bad actor leveraged their knowledge of technical systems, along with specialized tools and capabilities, to gain access to our testing environments and then used brute force attacks and other methods to make their way into other IT servers that included customer data. In short, this individual’s intent was to break in and steal data, and they succeeded.”
Sievert also shared that they are already working to beef up their cybersecurity. One of the steps it is taking is to forge a new long-term partnership with Mandiant and consulting firm KPMG.
Sievert says that they are aware they “need additional expertise to take our cybersecurity efforts to the next level — and we’ve brought in the help.”
By partnering with Mandiant and KPMG, they will work with teams to plan out “definitive actions that will be designed to protect our customers and others from malicious activity now and into the future.”
Sievert says he is confident that these new partnerships will help them improve their security measures.
The CEO shared that they have notified “just about every current T-Mobile customer” that were victimized by the attack. You can read the full post here.
Source: T-Mobile