It is reported that T-Mobile, an American telecom operator, has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit against the leakage of sensitive customer information caused by its network system intrusion last year.
Under the terms of the proposed settlement, the company will pay $350million to affected clients and their lawyers. It is reported that 76.6 million people may be affected, many of whom are T-Mobile customers. In addition, according to the settlement agreement, T-Mobile will invest about $150million in “data security and related technologies in 2022 and 2023”.
According to T-Mobile, these efforts will include “designing strategies and implementing plans to further transform our cyber security projects” through mandiant, Accenture and KPMG, and conducting nearly 900000 training courses for employees and partners. T-Mobile said in the submission that the settlement proposal was not an admission of misconduct. T-Mobile said it expected the court to approve the settlement agreement by December, but warned that it might be postponed due to appeals or other procedures.
About a year ago, T-Mobile first disclosed the details of this large-scale hacker attack. The leaked information includes the customer’s name, social security number, telephone number, address and date of birth. This information leak is one of at least four leaks that have attacked the wireless operator since 2015. The incident came to light after users of an underground forum claimed to sell the personal data of more than 100million people stolen from T-Mobile servers.
However, some hackers who stole T-Mobile data in 2021 may have been locked. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released an indictment against Diogo Santos Coelho, which seems to involve T-Mobile’s data sales. According to the indictment of the U.S. Department of justice, Diogo Santos Coelho allegedly posted on raidforums in August 2021 that he was “selling 30million SSN + DL + DOB databases”.
The indictment said: “a subsequent post confirmed that the hacked data belonged to a large telecommunications company and wireless network operator providing services in the United States.” Motherboard and Krebs on security both claimed that the unnamed telecom company was T-Mobile. However, T-Mobile did not respond to motherboard’s questions on this topic.
Aside from mining, extortion virus, and other network security events, the majority of other network security events are data-related. The majority of network attacks aim to obtain the attacked party’s data assets, which are threatening business continuity. Furthermore, some network security incidents are caused by poor enterprise management, which results in data leakage for internal reasons. To batch query and download data, attackers exploit various security vulnerabilities in the application system, such as injection, remote command execution, unauthorized access, ultra vires, and so on. Or, using security flaws, first obtain host and database operation permissions before stealing data.
In recent years, information technology has advanced rapidly, and the constant innovation and application of new technologies such as big data has accelerated business development. At the same time, business has become more reliant on it. Several systems were launched one after the other.
The number of business systems has increased dramatically. The enterprise’s information system data is typically greater than 100, and the volume of data carried is increasing. Furthermore, enterprise data demand continues to rise, as do the number of information systems, the amount of data carried, and the complexity of data. Similarly, in recent years, extortion viruses have destroyed data availability, data leakage events and other events have proliferated indefinitely, and data security has a direct impact on the normal development of enterprise business. You can also easily build an offsite disaster recovery (DR) center with Vinchin Backup & Recovery by duplicating XenServer backups at the primary site to a remote site or external storage.
