As an AT&T customer, I did receive the unwelcome news that they suffered a data breach.
Here is a rundown for what you should to know.
BREACH DETAILS
· This is a sizable data breach of about 109 million customers
· Call and text interactions from May 1, 2022 to October 31, 2022
· AT&T is blaming a 3rd party cloud platform — Snowflake
· FBI Investigating and 1 arrest has been made
· Hackers accessed and exfiltrated the files sometime from April 14th to 25th
· Telephone numbers and phone logs were acquired, but AT&T says call and text message content wasn’t exposed.
The breach does not contain customers’ personal information, like birthdays or social security numbers.
Apparently, AT&T Paid the ransom — which is not smart. Wired magazine reported that AT&T paid the hackers over $300,000 to delete the stolen information and provide video proof.
OVERALL RISK
Given that personal information was not exposed, the risk is nominal.
So far there is not conclusive proof that the data has been released in the wild, but that could change
Expect more phishing attacks
There could be some ramifications for those who need to keep their call logs secret — undercover agents, supreme court justices, cheating spouses, etc.
The geolocation data, which identifies the cellular towers that phones were connected to during activities, is interesting but likely not too valuable to attackers
SEC rules for mandatory shareholder notification were followed, with the US Government granting 2 delays to AT&T. Normally it is a 4 day rule.
AT&T has not deemed this breach a material event to its shareholders.
Overall, the scale of this breach is unfortunate, but the sensitivity of the data in not too worrying for the vast majority of those effected.
However, this breach does show an unfavorable trend in AT&T’s security posture.
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