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The T-Mobile breach is demonstrative of the need for telecoms companies and others to stay vigilant across their entire portfolio, through all layers of prevention, detection and response. You don’t want to just focus on whatever’s currently making headlines, like phishing. The best route to prevention is for companies to manage their cybersecurity portfolio holistically.

One of the specific challenges with telecommunications is their sheer exposure, the attack surface is massive. It’s one of the most difficult industries when it comes to cybersecurity because they are globally high-profile targets for so many, such as criminal and state-sponsored hackers. Additionally, handling sensitive data is core to their business and they have a lot of employees that facilitate business. This can lead to a challenge when it comes to insider threats, either through malicious or ill-informed employees.

What’s unique about the T-Mobile story is, while it’s still under investigation, there is a perfect storm scenario right now with work from home, which possibly closed off a lot of their eyeballs, with data just walking out the door and on the darknet. What’s also interesting is that cybercriminals selling that data online seems quaint by today’s standards, since anybody that’s making money off these crimes has far better ways of doing it. They have systems in place to collect and launder money, an entire cybercrime ecosystem at their disposal. That’s why, at first glance, this has the hallmarks of more amateur cybercriminals, but of course more will come out in the investigation.