T-Mobile Leaks Almost 50 Million People's SSNs and Driver's Licenses
Aug 19, 2021 @ 12:00 pm
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T-Mobile announced on Wednesday that a “a bad actor had compromised T-Mobile systems”:
“Some of the data accessed did include customers’ first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for a subset of current and former postpay customers and prospective T-Mobile customers.
“Our preliminary analysis is that approximately 7.8 million current T-Mobile postpaid customer accounts’ information appears to be contained in the stolen files, as well as just over 40 million records of former or prospective customers who had previously applied for credit with T-Mobile.”
If these are all US residents, that means about 1 in 6 Americans is affected.
Of course, T-mobile takes “customers’ protection very seriously” and is working “around the clock on this forensic investigation” in concert with “world-leading cybersecurity experts” etcetera etcetera. Those affected can expect notification from T-mobile, 2 years of McAfee’s ID Theft Protection Service, and future identity theft headaches.

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
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His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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