July 12, 2024
It’s happened again.
AT&T just reported another massive data breach…but this time it impacts “nearly all” of AT&T’s millions of current and former customers and even users who may have interacted with AT&T customers. And this time the data stolen included phone numbers of your calls and text interactions.
What the hell is going on over there?
Well, this morning – AT&T said back in April they learned that this customer data was “illegally downloaded from our workspace on a third-party cloud platform.”
The data stolen included phone numbers and text interactions from May first of 2022 to October 31st of 2022 for not only “nearly all of AT&T customers” but also customers of mobile virtual networks that use AT&T’s wireless network as well as AT&T’s landline customers who interacted with those cellular numbers. It includes not only the numbers but the counts of those calls or texts and total call duration for specific days or months. And includes the cell tower identification number of the most frequently used cell tower over different periods of time.
Now – this part is important – the stolen data does *not* include the content of those calls or texts, social security numbers, birthdays, or other personally identifiable information. It also does not include time stamp of calls or texts.
In an email to customers this morning the company said “at this time, we do not believe that the data is publicly available” AT&T said cyber criminals who have hit other companies claimed responsibility for this and says at least one person has since been arrested. The federal government said this morning they too are investigating what’s happening. AT&T confirmed they’ve locked down the “access point” and apologized saying “we sincerely regret this incident occurred and remain committed to protecting the information in our care.”
So what can you do? Well – if your information was stolen, at-and-t will contact you via text email or by US mail. You can also check your AT&T account online to see if there’s a notification. But other than that — there’s not a lot more you can do. AT&T says you should just be monitoring your phone and be careful when taking calls from numbers you don’t recognize and be alert to any fraud or theft attempts.
