Information Security
Nicolas Jacobsen was charged with intruding into the company's internal network in January 2005. Reports indicated that for about a year Jacobsen had access to customer passwords, e-mail, address books, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and Sidekick photos. Affected customers included members of the United States Secret Service. Secret Service informant identified Jacobsen as part of "Operation Firewall" which provided evidence that Jacobsen had attempted to sell customer information to others for identity theft. T-Mobile USA and the Secret Service did not elaborate on the methods Jacobsen used to gain access but sources close to the case indicated that Jacobsen exploited an unpatched flaw in the Oracle WebLogic Server application software used by the company. Additional SQL injection vulnerabilities with the company's web site were reported by Jack Koziol of the InfoSec Institute.
T-Mobile offers access to voice mail without the input of a password by default. Parties acting in bad faith may be able to access such voice mailboxes via Caller ID spoofing. To avoid this possibility, T-Mobile recommends that all customers password protect their mailboxes, but still offers the no password configuration by default due to customer demand.
On June 6, 2009, a message posted from an email account "pwnmobile_at_Safe-mail.net" to the Full Disclosure mailing list claimed that the company's network had been breached and showed sample data. The sender offered "databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009" to the highest bidder. On June 9, the company issued a statement confirming the breach but stating that customer data was safe. It claimed to have identified the source document for the sample data and believe it was not obtained by hacking. A later statement claimed that there was not any evidence of a breach.
Read more about this topic: T-Mobile USA
Famous quotes containing the words information and/or security:
“Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain’s strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)
“The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)