Should Customers Be Wary Of Further Data Breaches After AT&T Hack?

The company said in its SEC filing that the hackers had stolen phone and text message logs from their clientele spanning six months.

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Hackers reportedly acquired almost all of AT&T’s cellular subscriber records on Friday, July 12, 2024. The company said in its SEC filing that the hackers had stolen phone and text message logs from their clientele spanning six months.

According to the SEC filing, which was the outcome of an internal probe, hackers “unlawfully accessed and copied AT&T call logs” that were kept on a third-party cloud platform in April of this year.

Records of calls and messages made by AT&T users between around May 1, 2022, and October 31, 2022, as well as on January 2, 2023, were exposed in the most recent data breach.

The arguments

Similar circumstances with customer data being accessed due to employee login credentials at third-party cloud storage vendor Snowflake were experienced by Ticketmaster and Santander Bank prior to the AT&T breach.

Hackers simultaneously targeted around 160 companies as part of a broader plan that included the attack on Ticketmaster.

In addition to the US Federal Communications Commission conducting its own investigation, AT&T is collaborating with the Justice Department and the FBI to look into the incident.

The most recent data breach raises more questions about data security since, in spite of these precautions, there is still a chance that millions of Americans’ private information could be made public.

Customers are requesting that their service providers improve data security protocols for the time being.

The facts

In response to the hack, tech portal the Wired reported that AT&T paid the hacker around $370,000 to delete customer data that had been stolen from its database during the hacking incident.

The hacker is reported to have provided video evidence to prove that they had indeed deleted the records after receiving the funds.

The negotiation and settlement were facilitated by an intermediary named Reddington, acting on behalf of a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group.

Initially, the hacker had requested $1 million, but AT&T negotiated the amount down, and the payment was made in bitcoin on May 17, 2024. Reddington was also compensated for his role in negotiating the settlement.

Despite the data deletion, concerns linger about potential copies of the data being in the possession of unauthorised individuals.