T-Mobile's Struggle with Cyber Attacks: 8 Incidents in the Last 5 Years

When it comes to protecting its customers' data, T-Mobile hasn't been what you'd call good. Since 2018, hackers have broken into the company several times. At one point, they made fun of the company's bad security practices in public.

For example, T-Mobile just said in an SEC filing (which TechCrunch found) that the company was hacked for the eighth time in the last five years. This time, 37 million T-Mobile customers' privacy and safety were at risk.

T-Mobile says that starting in late November, a "bad actor" got the personal information, which included names, billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, T-Mobile account numbers, and information like "the number of lines on the account and plan features." As is usually the case when something like this happens, T-Mobile put out a statement trying to play it down:

"Our investigation is still going on, but the bad behavior seems to have been stopped for now, and there is no evidence that the bad actor was able to get into our systems or network and do damage."

The intruder used an API to get into T-systems Mobile's instead of getting in directly. But these kinds of claims don't mean much because as investigators dig deeper, the scope of security breaches tends to grow. When a break-in is found in the fall, it can be the start of a bigger one in the spring.

T-Mobile, like so many other companies today, collects too much information and then doesn't do what it needs to do to protect that information. It then lobbies U.S. lawmakers to make sure we don't strengthen U.S. privacy protections (like when Congress gutted the FCC's fairly modest broadband privacy rules or when it lobbies to stop federal reform), and the cycle continues forever.

T-Mobile has a bit of a history of being sloppy with the huge amount of location data it collects on its customers and then fighting tooth and nail against whatever weak accountability U.S. regulators can come up with. With a new program called "app insights," T-Mobile can now collect much more information about how users browse the web and use apps.

We've made it so that big companies with weak privacy and security standards don't always get held accountable. So, these companies don't have much of a reason to get better, since they now see small, pathetic fines from incompetent U.S. regulators (who, by design, don't have the resources to deal with privacy issues on a large scale) as a normal cost of doing business.

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