SmartMetric, Inc., manufacturer of fingerprint biometric secured credit and debit cards, commented on the T-Mobile data breach.
A dark web seller has offered for sale in exchange for bitcoin, 100 million personal records stolen from T-Mobile data systems. The most worrying part of this data theft is the breadth of the data stolen. It covers T-Mobile phone customers Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, phone numbers, address details as well as the user’s unique PIN used by T-Mobile to identify the phone service subscriber. As of August 18, 2021, T-Mobile is advising its pre-paid customers to change their PINs.
T-Mobile has confirmed the large size of the stolen information. According to a Yahoo! Finance article, “Roughly 47.8 million current and former or prospective customers have been affected by the cyberattack on its systems,” T-Mobile confirmed on Wednesday. This is nearly half of what is being claimed to be available on the dark web by the data thieves who say they have 100 million customer records.
According to a statement released by T-Mobile today, it is saying the data stolen includes personal information including the first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for a “subset of customers.” According to the Yahoo! Finance article, “So far, T-Mobile said it does not have any indication that the stolen files contain phone numbers, account numbers, passwords or financial information.” This is contrary to what a dark web seller of the data is stating. This seller, who is asking for $270,000 worth of bitcoin for 30 million T-Mobile users’ information, says the information he or she is selling does contain phone numbers as well as network identifier numbers for each user’s mobile phone number.
For the banking industry, this breach once again highlights the unreliability of Social Security and driver’s license numbers and data points found on driver’s licenses such as Dates Of Birth and home addresses, as factors for identifying a bank or credit card customer.
The opening of false new accounts including credit card accounts using what is called “synthetic identities” based on stolen identity markers will now see a spike along with identity theft touching home mortgages and many other aspects of the financial community.
We believe that this data breach along with a decade of serious other identity data breaches, has made the strongest case for the adoption of real time live biometrics for the identification of financial services users for such things as credit and debit card transactions, said today the President and CEO of SmartMetric, Chaya Hendrick.
In the statement T-Mobile announced its confidence that the entry point used to gain access to the data has been closed. This is an admittance that their systems were breached. The appearance within hours of the T-Mobile customer data for sale on the dark web gives evidence to the type and breadth of the actual data stolen.
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SmartMetric is the manufacturer of fingerprint biometric secured credit and debit cards. The SmartMetric biometric cards have a fully functional fingerprint scanner built inside the card that is used to scan the card users’ biometrics in order to identify the legitimacy of the card user.
The SmartMetric card is being put forward for biometric card testing and approval by one of the world’s largest credit and debit card payments networks. This will allow the SmartMetric card to be used by card issuers and banks around the world over the international payments network. Also allowing these same financial institutions to purchase the SmartMetric card and issue it as the next generation safer credit and debit card for their customers.
SmartMetric has issued patents and patents pending surrounding its biometric card technology.
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