I wasn’t hoping to have to come back from vacation with bad news, but this was is a huge one. While I was keeping tabs on this story thanks to my Discord community, I thought I was safe from this issue because I was no longer an AT&T customer. Apparently, I was wrong.
Today, AT&T has confirmed that it has suffered a data breach back in 2019. While they do not know the official extent of the damage, it is reported that 7.6 million current account holders and nearly 65.4 million former account holders “were contained in a data set released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago.”
It has yet to be determined if AT&T was directly involved or if the leak came from a vendor. AT&T has confirmed that the leak contains names and Social Security numbers. Initial analysis points to the data coming from 2019 and before. AT&T has also confirmed that no personal financial information or call history was a part of the leak.
The telecom company does not believe that there was any unauthorized access to its systems and that affected customers will be contacted. Also, don’t worry about the day to day operations. AT&T says this “has not had a material impact on AT&T’s operations.”
Let’s unpack AT&T’s statements
Let’s start with the fact that it was two weeks between someone reporting the data and AT&T responding. Two weeks ago, one of my community members posted an article from Bleeping Computer about two weeks ago. That article highlights that AT&T says the data didn’t come from them. The response is starting to age like milk right about now.
The other thing is the very corporate and shareholder appeasing statement coming from AT&T. I’m glad my money is good and nobody knows who I called. Also, I’m glad that day-to-day operations at the company vis-a-vis the data breach are still good. But let’s circle back to my SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER WAS POTENTIALLY LEAKED! While I don’t have any money and barely any credit. There should be consequences for this. But Congress is too busy trying to ban TikTok to do anything about actual data privacy.
I’ll see y’all later. I need to save up money to buy a thesaurus so I can look up more words for “rage”.
Source: PCWorld
