T-Mobile: ‘Third-party to blame for data breach’

Telecom provider T-Mobile denies that the company was hacked, after a hacker said on the dark web he was selling internal data. Instead, a third-party service provider is the origin of the data breach.

A threat actor called IntelBroker posted a message on BreachForums, a well-known hacker’s forum on the dark web. In the post he claimed that T-Mobile’s infrastructure was breached earlier this month and because of it much of its data leaked.

The hacker claims to have stolen the source code, images, SQL files, T-Mobile.com certifications, Terraform data and Siloprograms. To prove it, he posted several screenshots online.

T-Mobile however denies that its systems have been compromised. “We have no indication that T-Mobile customer data or source code was included and can confirm that the bad actor's claim that T-Mobile's infrastructure was accessed is false,” the company says in a statement to BleepingComputer.

A source told the editorial staff that the data breach originated at a third-party service provider. T-Mobile confirms it’s investigating this claim.

IntelBroker is a hacker who’s been very active recently. He claims to be the mastermind behind the data breach at DC Health Link in March 2023, an organization that manages health care plans for members of the U.S. House of Representatives, staff and their families.

IntelBroker is also linked to data breaches at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Home Depot and Europol. Most recently he offered to sell an unknown quantity of confidential data from the Santa Clara-based tech company AMD.

T-Mobile affected by several data breaches over the years

This isn’t the first time T-Mobile had to deal with a data breach. In August 2021 a hacker succeeded in infiltrating T-Mobile’s corporate network and stealing private information of 54.8 million current and former customers.

To avoid multiple class-action lawsuits, T-Mobile settled the cases by paying a settlement of 350 million dollars and another 150 million dollars to bump up security.

In January 2023 T-Mobile disclosed a data breach after a threat actor stole personal information of 37 million current customers.

Finally, in May 2023 the telecom provider said that the private information of hundreds of customers had been exposed for months to unknown hackers.