T-Mobile in the last 4 years has had 5 data breaches, the latest one being in August of 2021. This breach includes: the names, driver’s license numbers, Social security numbers, numbers for subscribers, former customers and even prospective customers; because of this breach, T-Mobile is now facing three lawsuits.
The person who claims responsibility for the latest hack in August, is 21-year-old John Brinns. The alleged hacker who is Brinns, was behind the August breach and he spoke out about it. Brinns stated that the breach had affected over 54 million people. Brinns also shared that T-Mobile has unprotected routers and weak spots, which helped him gain access to over 100 servers. However, Brinns did not share if he sold the data or if he was paid to do this breach.
Now whether you are affected by this or not, it’s still a good idea to secure your sensitive data incase of any hack.
So here are a few ways to help prevent this:
Lock Your Credit
One of the first things that should be done is that you freeze your credit. Doing this will help prevent anyone that has your information from opening a credit or taking out any loan in your name. Freezing your credit doesn’t take long; you will have to fill out a form with Equifax, Experian, and Transunion to do this.
One of the only downsides of freezing your credit is that when you want to make a certain purchase, you will need to go through the process of removing the freeze and refreezing.
Sign up for identity-theft monitoring
Monitoring your credit report is a very vital step, there is so much more that can be done with your personal information. An identity-monitoring service however will monitor the dark web for anyone trying to sell or trade away your personal information.
Get a password manager to store your logins
Using a complicated and long password for every online account you own is a good way to ensure that a breach of one service doesn’t lead to more hackers accessing more of you online accounts.
Instead, what you should do is get a password manager that can create, store, and autofill your login information for all of your accounts across websites. T-Mobile is also requesting that customer reset PINs and passwords to help protect their data.
