John Binns, a 21-year-old American now living in Turkey, told the Wall Street Journal that he was behind the T mobile security breach that affected more than 50 million people earlier this month .
The plot: Binns said he broke the T cell’s defenses after discovering an unprotected router exposed on the Internet, after scanning the operator’s Internet addresses for weaknesses using a publicly available tool.
- “I was panicking because I had access to something big,” he wrote in Telegram messages to the Journal. “Their safety is horrible.”
- “Generating noise was one of the goals,” Binns said. He declined to say if he sold any of the information he stole or if he was paid for the hack.
The big picture: It was the third major data leak the network has revealed in the past two years, according to WSJ. T-Mobile is the second largest mobile operator in the United States, hosting data from some 90 million mobile phones.
Background: Some of the information exposed to the breach includes names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and personally identifiable information. According to the newspaper, the breach is being investigated at the FBI office in Seattle.