AT&T Notifies Millions of Customers About Data Theft
AT&T has started informing millions of customers regarding the theft of personal data that was recently discovered online.
The telecommunications giant disclosed on Saturday that a dataset found on the "dark web" contains sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, for approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.
The company has taken action by resetting the passcodes of current users and will be reaching out to account holders whose personal information was compromised.
AT&T mentioned that it is uncertain whether the data "originated from AT&T or one of its vendors." The compromised data dates back to 2019 or earlier and does not seem to involve financial details or call history. Along with passcodes and Social Security numbers, the data may also include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates.
This incident is not the only crisis faced by the Dallas-based company this year.
New York prosecutors have announced that they are initiating an investigation into a wireless network outage in February, which left thousands of AT&T customers across the U.S. without cellphone service for approximately 12 hours.
Phone service was interrupted for many users, including those with Consumer Cellular, T-Mobile, UScellular, and Verizon. This led to widespread frustration and even briefly disrupted 911 service in certain areas.
AT&T issued an apology for the network disruption and offered affected customers a $5 credit as compensation.
