A customer was questioning if rumors that T-Mobile Austria was storing customer passwords in plain text, leaving the credentials like sitting ducks for hackers. Whoever was manning T-Mobile Austria’s Twitter account confirmed that this was the case, but that there was no need to worry because “our security is amazingly good.”
Hello Claudia! The customer service agents see the first four characters of your password. We store the whole password, because you need it for the login for https://t.co/vJapgJ50qc ^andrea
— T-Mobile Austria (@tmobileat) April 4, 2018
@Korni22 What if this doesn’t happen because our security is amazingly good? ^Käthe
— T-Mobile Austria (@tmobileat) April 6, 2018
That line is going to bite T-Mobile Austria in the backside, if or when they next get hacked. To be fair, it’s late at night in Europe and the Twitter account was probably being handled by an overworked social media worker, but it’s not a good look. Especially when people started digging further and found various security shortcomings. The whole thread is a mind job.
But that doesn’t excuse the plain-text password storage.
Robin Edgar
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