The American telecommunications group AT&T has admitted this Saturday to the leak of personal data of some 73 million accounts of current or former customers. The company has proceeded to reset the passwords of some 7.6 million customers, who had been determined to be circulating on the dark internet. In addition, it has announced that it will inform users what data has been compromised.
The company concluded that specific data fields AT&T uses for its customers' accounts appeared in a data set posted on the dark web about two weeks ago. The company assures that it is not yet known whether the data in these fields comes from AT&T or one of its providers. For the rest of the data set, which includes personal information such as social security numbers, the origin of the data is still being evaluated.
The information varied by customer and account, but could include full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and the access code.
AT&T has launched an investigation involving internal and external cybersecurity experts. “Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former account holders,” says the company.
The company has no evidence that unauthorized access occurred with those leaked user data and passwords and is contacting those affected. “We will separately contact individuals whose sensitive personal information has been compromised and offer them free credit monitoring and identity theft services,” he states in a question and answer page for his clients.
“As of today, this incident has not had a material impact on AT&T's operations,” the company says. The incident occurs weeks after a blackout that left its mobile phone customers without service for hours in cities across much of the country. The company offered $5 compensation to affected customers for the inconvenience caused.
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