Brief: T-Mobile installs GPRS network firewall

By Bob Brewin

November 21, 2002 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - T-Mobile USA Inc. said it has fixed problems that allowed hackers to probe a limited number of customers connected to its General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network, according to company spokeswoman Kim Thompson.
Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile has installed a firewall on the segment of its network that had allowed hackers to probe GPRS IP connections that are used by what Thompson described as "less than 100 users" (see story).
Mike Palmer, the Washington-based technology director for the broadcast division of The Associated Press in New York, had detected more than 25 hacker probes in the past month against a laptop PC used to send video and text files over the T-Mobile GPRS network.
Palmer said he checked his inbound IP traffic on Tuesday and was no longer getting unsolicited inbound traffic.
Under the billing format used by T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG in Bonn, Germany, and other U.S.-based cellular carriers, users of mobile data service pay by the megabyte, meaning Palmer would have to pay for the hacker attacks if his total traffic passed a certain level each month.

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