T-Mobile says telco hackers had ‘no access’ to customer call and text message logs

Avijit SahNovember 28, 2024

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T-Mobile says telco hackers had ‘no access’ to customer call and text message logs

During an ongoing industry-wide cyberattack targeting internet and phone businesses, U.S. telecom major T-Mobile stated Wednesday that hackers had “no access” to its customers’ voicemails, texts, and calls.

In a statement, T-Mobile’s chief security officer, Jeff Simon, claimed that the business had discovered “attempts to infiltrate our systems” in recent weeks, which he said came from a different telecom provider that was linked to T-Mobile’s network. No name was given to that company.

Simon said

“We quickly severed connectivity to the provider’s network as we believe it was — and may still be — compromised,”.

According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, T-Mobile and a number of other telecom behemoths, including AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen, were compromised by the China-backed hacker collective known as Salt Typhoon as the part of a larger espionage operation that also targeted the communications of senior Americans and U.S. officials, including presidential candidates.

T-Mobile stated on Wednesday that it was unable to identify the hackers with certainty, but added:

“We do not see these or other attackers in our systems at this time.” The company did not explicitly rule out a previous intrusion of its systems, saying that its cybersecurity defenses stopped the attackers “from accessing sensitive customer information.”

A T-Mobile representative told TechCrunch that metadata on customer phone calls and texts, including caller, sender, and recipient details as well as the dates and times of communications, are regarded as “sensitive” customer records and were not accessed.

T-Mobile spokesperson Michelle Jacob said

“We have robust technical means, including logs, to be able to identify threats and activity on our systems. It was this type of telemetry that enabled us to quickly identify suspicious activity and take action to protect our systems and customers,”.

T-Mobile stated that it made investments in cybersecurity strengthening in the past, largely due to multiple data breaches that exposed the personal data of millions of T-Mobile users.

In a public alert last week, the FBI and the U.S. cybersecurity organization CISA stated that China-backed hackers were focusing on telecoms as part of a “broad and significant cyber espionage campaign” against wiretap systems, which are mandated by law to be installed by U.S. phone and internet firms.