(WLUK) — Cellcom continues to work to fully restore its services following a recent cyber incident that has impacted customers’ ability to make phone calls and send text messages.
In a video released Tuesday, Cellcom’s CEO said there’s no evidence users’ personal information had been impacted in the cyber incident.
But cyber experts say the incident at Cellcom should be a wakeup call for other companies to take extra cyber security precautions. Although Cellcom is a smaller cell phone company, it doesn’t mean larger companies are immune to cyber attacks.
Wednesday marks one week into the Cellcom outage — and customers are losing patience.
“I want to pull my hair out. It’s frustrating,” Cellcom customer Angela Dontje said.
Dontje and her husband, Jeremy, own D & D 24 Hour Towing and Complete Auto Repair in Appleton. While the outage has had minimal impacts on their business, it’s turned their personal life around — resulting in them temporarily switching to a new cell phone carrier.
“It is very scary, because it’s happened to my brother in the past, and my dad’s a former banker, and he’s watching our stuff very closely now because of this,” Dontje said.
The Dontjes are in the middle of buying a home, and worry about what information could have been breached in the Cellcom cyber incident. It’s leaving them, along with other customers, concerned about their own personal data — even taking extra steps to ensure they’re safe while staying diligent.
“I know if something happens, we’ve had our mortgage company reach out to us and say, ‘Hey, did you guys buy anything recently?’ And luckily, we haven’t had that lately,” Dontje said.
The Cellcom cyber incident also brings concern of scammers taking advantage of people during the outage.
Appleton cyber expert Curt Esser of Esser Consulting, LLC reminds people to be careful and remain suspicious of bad actors.
“Whenever these types of things happen, we see scammers going after their customers. And that is one thing that is gonna be happening. It’s happening right now, we know it,” Esser said.
Esser said you should beware of fake email addresses and phone numbers, and suggests the Cellcom cyber incident is a sign of a much larger-scale issue.
“This was an attack on not just the company Cellcom, but it was an attack on the telecommunications industry,” Esser said.
He hopes Cellcom comes out of this incident as a stronger and more secure company. He said it’s important for other companies, no matter what industry, to take extra cyber safety precautions to keep something like this from happening to them.
“In the cyber security industry, it’s called left of boom or right of boom. You want to spend left of boom — preventive measures — as opposed to something after the incident happened,” Esser said.
FOX 11 reached out to Cellcom for an update on the outage, but they referred us back to CEO Brighid Riordan’s announcement made Tuesday.
We also reached out to the FBI, the Federal Department of Justice and the Brown County Sheriff’s Office regarding the matter. All were unable to be interviewed at this time.
