T-Mobile Settles with Customers for $350M Following a Significant Data Breach

T-Mobile has consented to pay $350 million to customers impacted by a class action lawsuit after admitting last year that sensitive information like social security numbers had been taken in a cyber attack.

The mobile phone carrier stated in a filing on Friday that the money will be used to cover class member claims, legal fees for the plaintiff's attorney, and settlement administration expenses. Additionally, it added that it would invest $150 million in cybersecurity in 2023 to strengthen data protection-related technologies.

Over 76 million US residents were influenced by the massive data breach last August, which disclosed their social security numbers, driver's license information, and other ID documents. T-Mobile said it thought a hacker had obtained information on roughly 53 million current, former, or potential customers during its initial statements regarding the breach. In August 2021, the firm started looking into the breach after Vice uncovered allegations made on a dark web portal that purportedly offered T-Mobile customer data for sale.

T-Mobile said in a statement on Friday that they put customers first in everything they did, while they were under a cyber attack like any other business, they increased the scope of cybersecurity programs to fortify current ones. It added the specifics of how to get there, including creating a “cybersecurity transformation office” that directly reports to their CEO, collaboration with leading data security companies, training employees, etc.

The company said that it anticipates having the terms of the settlement approved by the court as early as December 2022.

After acquiring rival Sprint in 2020, Bellevue, Washington-based T-Mobile joined AT&T and Verizon as one of the nation's largest providers of mobile services. Following the merger, it reported having a total of 108.7 million subscribers as of the end of Q4 2021.

Throwing money reluctantly at cyber threats may be one solution, but problems such as tarnished reputation, degraded brand trust, spending to salvage its name, and data protection that expect to ramp up won’t disappear overnight. The company under attack often feels the consequences even though time lapses.

As Napoleon once put it, the attack is the best method of defense. However, it’s not the case when it comes to data security. Instead of being offensive, companies might as well establish a clear set of rules or strategies against looming internet threats.

What a company needs except for those mentioned above? Employee training, professional data security companies, enhancing cybersecurity tools and systems, what else can a business do? Having a BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) plan is worth trying. It is a set of tactics, guidelines, and processes that describe how a company should react to or adjust to prospective threats or unanticipated disruptive occurrences while limiting the negative effects.

While backup and recovery are the eternal themes of a BCDR plan, there are many troubles and initial investments in facilities and other aspects when you implement it. This is where reliable solutions like Vinchin Backup & Recovery come in and help you with that. The solution performs frequent backups and efficient recovery with a bunch of technologies.

Toilless VM Backup: Improve your backup efficiency with CBT-driven incremental backup, data reduction technologies, and mail alerts under customizable backup schedules through LAN, LAN-Free, and other specialized transmission modes (HotAdd for VMware). Then centrally manage these jobs in one administration interface with progress details.

Vinchin Encrypted Backups:This technique employs a bank-level algorithm to decline unauthorized access during the data transfer and ensure the safety of backup data in Vinchin server. Passwords will be needed to verify when the administrator performs a VM restore.

Instant Recovery:15s instant recovery of Vinchin Backup & Recovery brings a failed workload back to operate in seconds for almost seamless business continuity and minimum system downtime.

Data leak and other cybersecurity incidents like T-Mobile cost companies’ prestige and marketing performance, so, neither of us want to be on the victim list on the dark web or resolve a class-action lawsuit. Hence, setting up a BCDR plan to follow in case of attacks and errors might be the best chance of surviving and thriving. Get the 60 days full-featured free trail of Vinchin Backup & Recovery to back up now.