T-Mobile data was not taken by hacking, company says

IDG News Service - T-Mobile USA data that was posted to the Internet over the weekend is genuine, but the company was not hacked, the U.S. carrier said Tuesday.

On Saturday, hackers posted what appear to be logfiles taken from T-Mobile's network to the Full Disclosure mailing list, claiming to have hacked the carrier. "We have everything, their databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009," they wrote.

According to T-Mobile, however, these claims are false. The hackers did manage to get legitimate T-Mobile data, but they didn't do it by hacking into the company's network, the company said. "The document in question has been determined to be a T-Mobile document though there is no customer information contained in the document," the company said in a statement. "There is no evidence to indicate that the T-Mobile security system was hacked into nor any evidence of a breach."

There's also no information that any customer information was compromised, T-Mobile said.

A company spokeswoman declined to say what the data was or exactly how the data was obtained, citing a pending investigation.

The hackers who claimed to have broken into the carrier said that they were trying to sell the data to the "highest bidder." That may prove difficult, however, as e-mail sent to the pwnmobile@safe-mail.net address they listed on Full Disclosure is now being returned as undeliverable.