Over 73 Million AT&T Customers Have Had Their Data Leaked On The Dark Web
If you’re an AT&T user, you might have noticed that the passcodes on your account have been reset, and the reason for this is a proactive response from the carrier against a data leak that affected 7.6 million current customers and 65.4 million former customers. The company announced this in a report dated yesterday.
The good news is that the leak supposedly doesn’t contain any financial information, so you don’t need to keep a close eye on your bank account statement or anything. However, the bad news is that it does contain personal information like full names, phone numbers, addresses, social security numbers, AT&T account numbers and passcodes, and dates of birth. That’s ample fodder for people to attempt to use your identity for nefarious activities.
The company says it’ll contact compromised customers and provide them with identity theft and credit monitoring services for free. For now, you can do little beyond choosing a new passcode after the reset and keeping a close eye on your credit reports.
The Leaked Customer Details Might Date Back To 2021
Data breaches suck, but they aren’t new. Back in 2021, a hacker, ShinyHunters, tooted his horn, and he managed to obtain the sensitive account data of 73 million AT&T customers. Back then, the company said that was false, and they hadn’t suffered a breach of any kind. They said that the samples of customer data the hacker showed off weren’t congruent with any from their systems.
AT&T has determined that AT&T data-specific fields were contained in a data set released on the dark web. While AT&T has made this determination, it is not yet known whether the data in those fields originated from AT&T or one of its vendors.
AT&T
However, now, the company admits that the data seems to date from 2019 or earlier, but they still claim they can’t see any evidence of illegal access to their systems. That may be true, and if so, is even more worrying, as it means there’s clearly a route to their data that they can’t account for. As the quote above states, the data could be leaked from a vendor.
This data showed up on the dark web about two weeks ago, and the hacker’s 73 million claim aligns perfectly with the sum of the present and former users whose data was compromised, so the culprit seems pretty easy to spot. Hopefully, he’ll be brought to justice, and the security breach can be investigated on a deeper level.
