Experian – one of the largest data brokers and credit agencies in the world, who rather ironically offers advice to organisations should they suffer a breach – has confirmed it has itself been hacked, again!
The company confirmed yesterday that 15 million people, including the customers of T-Mobile, who had applied for Experian credit checks, may have had their private information exposed.
Speaking about the news, T-Mobile’s CEO said he was ‘incredibly angry’. I’d imagine he is! He also wanted to reassure customers that “their T-Mobile’s systems nor network were part of the intrusion”.
While details of exactly what has happened are sketchy, what is known (according to Experian’s questions page) is that “it discovered an unauthorised party accessed T-Mobile data housed in an Experian server”.
Information from the hack includes names, addresses and social security, driver’s license and passport numbers. The license and passport numbers were in an encrypted field, however Experian has said the encryption may also have been compromised.
The advice usually when a breach like this occurs is to enlist the services of a credit monitoring agency – it’s also worth bearing in mind that when any hack of this kind occurs, phishers will try to spoof users, so be extra vigilantt should you receive an email that claims to be from either T-Mobile or Experian in the next few weeks.
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