Today, July 12, 2024, AT&T is reporting second massive data breach which affects EVERY customer. (You can read about the earlier data breach here.)
Unlawful access of customer data
On the support pages of their website, AT&T has posted that customer data was downloaded from a third-party platform.
Our investigation found that the downloaded data included phone call and text message records of nearly all of AT&T cellular customers from May 1, 2022 to October 31, 2022 as well as on January 2, 2023. These records identify other phone numbers that an AT&T wireless number interacted with during this time, including AT&T landline (home phone) customers. For a subset of the records, one or more cell site ID numbers associated with the interactions are also included.
-AT&T
To make it worse AT&T goes on to say that the call and text records in which their customers interacted with were also compromised. Included in this data was counts of calls and texts, and call durations. AT&T clarifies that the downloaded data does not include the actual content of the any calls or texts.
AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach
TechCrunch reports that along with call and texting data being breached, location data was also stolen.
Some of the stolen records include cell site identification numbers associated with phone calls and text messages, information that can be used to determine the approximate location of where a call was made or text message sent.
-TechCrunch
The tech site goes on to report that they spoke with an AT&T representative and was told that the customer records were stolen form the cloud data service named Snowflake during a breach targeting Snowflake’s customers.
Snowflake allows its corporate customers, like tech companies and telcos, to analyze huge amounts of customer data in the cloud. It’s not clear for what reason AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake, and the spokesperson would not say.
-TechCrunch
AT&T Addresses Illegal Download of Customer Data
AT&T says they are working with law enforcement to arrest those involved in the incident. They assure customer that the the compromised data does not include “content of calls or texts, personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information. It also does not include some typical information you see in your usage details, such as the time stamp of calls or texts. While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number.”
AT&T says they believe the data is not publicly available, but how much should we trust this corporate giant who has let hackers inside it’s network and who have stolen millions of data points from AT&T customers?
Please read our previous entry about AT&T’s last data breach. It was huge, and user information was confirmed to be on the dark web months before AT&T even informed anyone they had been breached.
