­T-Mobile Germany has admitted to losing the personal data belonging to its 17 million customers. The theft, which has only just been revealed occurred back in early 2006, and involved telephone numbers, dates of birth, addresses and email addresses.

 In a statement, the company said that the records do not contain bank details, credit card numbers or call data, and that it has no evidence to confirm that the records have led to harassment of users in 2006 or subsequent years, or that they have otherwise been misused by unauthorized parties.

As soon as the theft was detected in spring 2006, T-Mobile's parent company - Deutsche Telekom reported the theft to the public prosecutors' office. Within the scope of their investigations, the public prosecutors' office was able to recover storage media. Extensive research conducted over several months on the Internet and in data trading places could not reveal any clues indicating that the data had been offered or disseminated on the black market. Owing to this, Deutsche Telekom assumed that there would be no dissemination of the data.

However, the German newspaper, Der Spiegel was apparently able to buy the data in question via third parties.

"We are very concerned by the fact that the incident from 2006 is relevant once again. Until now, we were under the assumption that the data in question had been recovered completely as part of the investigations of the public prosecutors' office and were safe," said Philipp Humm, Managing Director at T-Mobile Deutschland. "Notwithstanding the fact that the culprits have been at work with a tremendous criminal potential, we earnestly regret to say that we have not been able to protect our customer data in line with our standards."

Following the data theft in 2006, T-Mobile says that it has intensified their security measures.

Source:cellular-news