AT&T confirms data from 73 million customers has been exposed on the dark web

Telecommunications company AT&T Inc. has confirmed that personal data about 73 million past and present customers recently leaked on the dark web is believed to date back to 2019 or earlier.

The data in question was first sold on the now-defunct hacking forum Raid Forums in 2021, and was said at the time to include social security numbers and dates of birth. The same data then surfaced earlier this month after being disposed of by the infringing seller.

The dump contained data on AT&T’s 7.6 million current customers and 65.4 million former customers. AT&T said in a support article today that it has contacted current customers to reset their passwords and is also communicating with former account holders regarding the breach of sensitive personal information.

“Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation,” AT&T said. “To our knowledge, the compromised data appears to date back to his pre-2019 years and does not include any personal financial information or call history.”

AT&T says the information in the data varies by customer and account, but may include name, email address, mailing address, phone number, Social Security number, date of birth, AT&T account number, and passcode. It is said that there is.

In addition to resetting their passcodes, AT&T is encouraging affected customers to remain vigilant by monitoring their account activity and credit reports. Affected customers will receive free fraud alerts from major credit bureaus and can view their credit reports for free through Freecreditreports.com.

The company said the data contained fields specific to AT&T data and added that it does not yet know whether the data in those fields came from AT&T or one of its vendors. .

It’s definitely concerning that AT&T doesn’t know where the 2024 data is coming from. The company was aware that the same data was being sold to him in 2021, but he apparently was unable to trace the source at the time, at least according to AT&T.

It’s also worth noting that in 2021, an AT&T spokesperson denied in an email to SiliconANGLE that the data belonged to the company. “Based on today’s investigation, it appears that the information displayed in the Internet chat room did not originate from our systems,” a spokesperson said at the time.

Whether AT&T is at fault for the data breach is debatable. Companies whose data has been compromised need to find out where that data came from. It’s hard to believe that AT&T has been unable to identify the source of the breach for the past few years.

Photo: Bill Bradford/Flickr