It was totally Samsung’s fault that crims stole your personal info from a Samsung site, says Samsung-blaming Sprint

July 16, 2019 TH Author

Sprint has told some of its subscribers that a piss-poor Samsung website exposed their personal details to the internet.

The North American mobile carrier is right now sending out letters (PDF) to unlucky customers whose account and device details were leaked onto the web thanks to, apparently, dodgy Samsung coding and miscreants.

“On June 22, Sprint was informed of unauthorized access to your Sprint account using your account credentials via the Samsung.com ‘add a line’ website,” Sprint wrote in its missive to aggrieved subscribers.

“The personal information of yours that may have been viewed includes the following: phone number, device type, device ID, monthly recurring charges, subscriber ID, account number, account creation date, upgrade eligibility, first and last name, billing address and add-on services.”

Here’s what happened: fraudsters somehow obtained and used some Sprint customers’ account information to log into the Samsung add-a-line website and, from there, gathered additional personal details on Sprint accounts. Add-a-line is or was, from what we can tell, a means to add additional services to your phone’s postpaid monthly voice plan.

PIN pointed

The disclosure notice did not specify whether those Sprint customer details were used for any further shenanigans, but Sprint did say it was resetting customer PINs in at least some cases. The carrier did not say how many of its customers were affected.

“No other information that could create a substantial risk of fraud or identity theft was acquired,” Sprint added.

Samsung, for its part, admits its site was the source of the leak, but said the credentials used by the attackers were gathered elsewhere.

“Samsung takes security very seriously. We recently detected fraudulent attempts to access Sprint user account information via Samsung.com, using Sprint login credentials that were not obtained from Samsung,” a Sammy spokesperson told El Reg.

“We deployed measures to prevent further attempts of this kind on Samsung.com and no Samsung user account information was accessed as part of these attempts.”

While Sprint did not say it would be offering any identity protection services, the carrier is advising customers to keep a close eye on their accounts and consider placing a credit fraud alert and notifying authorities if any suspicious activity is found. ®

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