T-Mobile pays a $500 million settlement after leaking data on about 50 million users

by do son ·

T-Mobile data breaches
In August 2021, the US network operator T-Mobile suffered a huge data breach, and American hackers living in Turkey stole the database. The database contains information on 7.8 million T-Mobile postpaid customers and 40 million former or potential T-Mobile customers.
The leaked information included names, addresses, birthdays, driver’s license information, social security numbers, and users’ phone numbers. Account numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, and PINs were not leaked.

The 21-year-old hacker who launched the attack mocked T-Mobile’s poor security. He began scanning T-Mobile’s systems for vulnerabilities in the summer of 2020, eventually finding access to T-Mobile’s data center in Washington state.

In response to this issue, T-Mobile is currently planning to spend $500 million on a settlement. The settlement plan has been submitted to the federal court in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, and the next step is to wait for the approval of the court.

T-Mobile is set to pay $350 million in damages to affected customers and $150 million to bolster its security measures. Affected users can receive compensation ranging from $25 to $100 and two years of identity theft protection. That is, if criminals use the leaked data to falsify user information, T-Mobile will also be held responsible.

Some of these users can get up to $25,000 in compensation. Because some users have been defrauded or fraudulently used because of data leakage, causing huge losses.

The settlement covers at least 44 class-action lawsuits across the U.S., and the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or groups of lawyers representing consumers, will take up to 30 percent of the settlement costs, or $105 million.

Via: arstechnica

Tags: T-Mobile data breaches