How T-Mobile was hacked

Wired has an article up which mentions that T-Mobile was hacked due to them not patching a known security hole in their Weblogic application server. As far as I recall, that is a system for running Java applications, making it easier to build web applications from the front end to through to the database side - and with that you can also link to other interfaces and hardware. One of my old jobs used Weblogic for the same sort of thing.

The security hole was known and patched in 2003 and T-Mobile was negligent and left their system unpatched up until recently, which is what allowed the hacker/cracker to get in via a simple script-kiddie method (special headers).

While what the guy did was not legal, it is massively an issue that T-Mobile left their system unpatched for so long and the fact that they are responsible for so much client data - and as a result when their systems don't have the right security (as was the case here), that data can be grabbed by attackers and then used for nefarious purposes or sold to others.
This means people can spam you or far worse things such as using the data for identity theft and phishing.

This very much points to major reasons to leave T-Mobile if you are currently a customer of theirs. Granted, they should hopefully use this as a huge warning to get their act together, but large corporations move very slowly.

Posted by Eric at February 28, 2005 10:46 AM | TrackBack