T-Mobile fury as hackers steal customer data from credit agency

T-Mobile's chief executive has expressed outrage over a breach at a credit monitoring service that exposed private data from 15 million customers of the mobile carrier.

CEO John Legere's comments came after T-Mobile learned of the hack at Experian, a service used to evaluate applications from potential customers.

T-Mobile said the breach exposed the names, addresses and birthdates, as well as encrypted fields with social security numbers and other identification numbers such as those from driver's licenses or passports.

"Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian, but right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected," Legere said in a statement to customers Thursday.

"I take our customer and prospective customer privacy very seriously. This is no small issue for us. I do want to assure our customers that neither T-Mobile's systems nor network were part of this intrusion and this did not involve any payment card numbers or bank account information."

Experian said in its statement Thursday that on September 15 it "discovered an unauthorized party accessed T-Mobile data housed in an Experian server."

Experian said it "notified appropriate federal and international law enforcement agencies and has taken additional security steps to help prevent future incident."

Consumer activist group US PIRG said the breach was "completely outrageous since credit bureaus are subject to very high security standards." It said that losing social security numbers, which can be used for identity theft, "makes this breach much worse."

© 2015 AFP