73 million US carrier customer accounts had their personal information exposed

In a press release, the network said 'user data was posted on the dark web about two weeks ago', containing a lot of personal information such as names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers. festival.

" Currently, we cannot determine whether the source of the leak is from AT&T's system or from the suppliers ," the telecommunications company said. ' The company found no evidence of unauthorized access to internal systems leading to data file exposure'.

AT&T has not identified the source of the leak of personal information of more than 70 million customer accounts

The data is dated from 2019 or earlier. According to AT&T, the leak did not contain information about customer finances or call history. Specifically, 7.6 million current accounts and 65.7 million old accounts are affected.

The carrier said it has contacted affected customers with instructions for resetting their passwords, as well as urging users to be wary of changes to their accounts or suspicious credit reports.

The first news about the leak was posted by an account on social network X (Twitter) named vx-underground on March 17.

At the time, AT&T asserted there was " no indication that the system was compromised." The data file on the forum does not appear to come from this company'.

In February, AT&T experienced a mobile phone service outage that lasted for hours. The network operator explained that the cause was due to a system problem, not a network attack. CEO John Stankey later apologized to customers for the incident and 'compensated' each account 5 USD.

Serious widespread network outages like AT&T's do not happen often in the US. In 2021, T-Mobile had to pay about 19.5 million USD to settle an investigation by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) due to service interruption for 12 hours and 13 minutes in June 2020.

It resulted in network congestion on T-Mobile's 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, causing more than 23,000 calls to 911 to go undelivered. In addition, the carrier must also implement a compliance plan with new commitments to improve 911-related notifications, as well as update the situation within 2 hours of the first notification.

Kareem Winters

Update 02 April 2024