T-Mobile joins data breach elite
17 million customer records go missing
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
T-Mobile has admitted losing 17 million German customer records including names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and email addresses.
The records of German customers were stolen in 2006 and included secret addresses of politicians, an ex-federal president, celebrities and others likely to be at risk from having their contact details released. No bank details were included in the stolen data.
The company said a storage device containing the files "is in the hands of unknown parties". T Mobile's parent, Deutsche Telekom, said it had no evidence that the records had been used since 2006.
Although the records had been offered for sale online, no one had bought them.
The company said it had made every effort to get the data back and has improved procedures to stop a similar theft happening again, Der Spiegel reports.
T-Mobile is already under investigation by German prosecutors for allegedly snooping on calls made by board directors, major shareholders and reporters.
Deutsche Telekom apologised for the loss and has set up a hotline to deal with worried customers. German regulators are investigating the incident. ®
COMMENTS
don't worry tho
They won't be charged with anything, as there was no criminal intent... makes me feel much better! :)
PS - I know this is Germany, not the UK, but telecom's companies getting away with giving people's private info away is the same in any country.
And still it goes on...
Nobody cares about your personal data any more. Companies all over the place are storing their data on unencrypted laptops or posting it on unencrypted tapes/CDs. I used to work for a company that looks after the pensions for a number of police forces and while they had (pretty lax) security around the rack containing the data they had no controls on people making copies over the network to their laptops, ipods, etc. This company holds pension data (including the full set of personal information) for customers of the Pru and most of the civil service pensions schemes run for the Met Police, NHS etc.
This is largely because they believe that promoting people on "time served" rather than ability is a good idea and have got senior "technical" staff who think that having 17 firewalls which are all using outdated software (and have no support contract) is better than having two that are actively managed.
@ The Dark Lord
They not the only ones, I am with orange and the same thing happens, that said i can normally get a very nice line rental discount off these companies as they are working on commission from the phone companies and dont tend to care about lowering there profits :) works for me.
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