- Freedom Mobile suffered a supply chain breach through a subcontractor account, exposing customer PII
- The stolen data includes names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and account numbers; passwords and payment information are not affected
- The company warns about phishing risks; There is no evidence of a data breach yet, the investigation is ongoing.
Canadian telecommunications provider Freedom Mobile recently suffered a supply chain attack, in which it lost sensitive data from an as yet undisclosed number of customers.
In a data breach notification letter posted on its website earlier this week, Freedom said hackers broke into a subcontractor’s account, through which they accessed personal information “of a limited number” of its clients. The violation was detected on October 23 and access was terminated.
However, when the compromised account was locked and sanitized, the hackers managed to steal people’s full names, mailing addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers (both home and cell), as well as Freedom Mobile account numbers.
Phishing warning issued
While the telecommunications company emphasizes that payment information and passwords were not obtained in the attack, the threat actors stole more than enough information to mount highly devastating phishing attacks.
For example, they could contact Freedom Mobile customers, posing as the telecommunications company, and threaten to cancel the account unless victims urgently log in (via a fake login page that steals credentials) or download a program (which is actually malware). Such an email, along with personally identifiable information, could appear credible to recipients and could therefore result in compromise.
At the time of this publication, no threat actor claimed responsibility for the attack and Freedom Mobile found no evidence of data being leaked into the wild. Still, users are advised to keep an eye on incoming messages, especially those that claim to come from the telco and have a sense of urgency. “Freedom Mobile will never ask you for personal information such as credit card numbers, banking information, passwords or PIN codes via email or SMS,” the notification reads.
Freedom Mobile was founded in 2008 as Wind Mobile and currently has more than two million customers across Canada. It was acquired by Vidéotron in 2023, bringing the total number of subscribers to over 3.5 million.
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