Recently, T-Mobile announced that they had suffered another data breach to end off what was an already disastrous 2020. This marks the fourth data breach in the past three years for the telecommunications provider. Though fortunately this time, the exposed data did not include any sensitive information. However, something must be said for a company that has faced a data breach year after year since 2018. These breaches can really take its toll on the company’s brand reputation and can be the deciding factor for consumers and businesses when choosing a telecommunications provider.
We decided to take a look at this from a slightly different angle than what’s already been written. We went on their careers page and took a look at their open Cybersecurity roles. Looking in detail we can see that there are currently 19 Cybersecurity positions open, some of which have been open for as long as five months.
When you take a look at this you have to question what’s taking so long to fill these positions. Especially when this particular role is a management level position within their Incident Response team, something that should be of the highest priority. With 4 breaches since 2018, you could ask if they are struggling to attract people, major breach fatigue is a real thing and experienced IT people know this.
Of course we do not know if these are growth or replacement positions but with so many open positions they are running lean right now and have been for a while. Knowing the market so well these are fillable roles, so T-Mobile needs to focus on seeing what they can do to attract more staff and quicken up their processes. As a company that has helped a Seattle headquartered company grow from 5 to 28 people in just 3 months there is no excuse for positions like this to sit open for this period of time.
We are sure their clients will expect an improvement in their security posture and running fully staffed will be a big help. Let’s hope the board backs the CISO and gives them what they need to secure their customers data so they can ultimately get moving on hiring the people they need.