Earlier this month, AT&T disclosed that the personal data of approximately 73 million customers, including Social Security numbers, was found on the dark web. The company stated on Saturday that it is still investigating the origin of the data leak, as it remains unclear whether it originated from within the company or one of its vendors.
- AT&T has revealed that the leaked data set, which was found on the dark web two weeks ago, appears to be from 2019 or earlier. This leak has affected approximately 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former account holders. The data set includes sensitive personal information, such as Social Security numbers.
- Despite the leak, AT&T maintains that there has been no unauthorized access to its systems and that the incident has not significantly affected the company’s operations. Following the leak, AT&T took immediate action by resetting the passwords of millions of customer accounts, as reported by Bloomberg.
- AT&T has committed to proactively reaching out to those affected by the leak and will provide credit where it’s due.
Last month, AT&T users across Texas, Florida, California, and other states experienced a significant disruption, with over 70,000 customers losing cellular service. John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, stated that both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI aided AT&T in investigating the outage, and they found no signs of a cyberattack. In response to the incident, AT&T provided a $5 credit to the affected customers, which the company claims is the average cost of a full day’s service. An internal investigation into the incident attributed the outage to an internal error.
In the past year, several communication companies have experienced data leaks. Last month, Verizon reported to the Maine Attorney General’s Office that an internal data breach in September exposed the personal information of over 63,000 employees. An internal probe found that a Verizon employee had unauthorized access to a file containing employees’ personal details, including names, addresses, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.
In a separate incident, T-Mobile informed the Maine Attorney General’s Office last May that a data breach affected 836 customers. However, no personal financial information was compromised in this breach. This incident followed another breach reported a few months prior, which affected approximately 37 million customers.
Stay tuned, follow Zewani Google News channel. 
