AT&T suffered a data breach,users urge to change passcode

The American multinational giant AT&T confirmed to have suffered a data breach last April, personal data of an unknown number of users was exposed.

The American multinational telecommunications corporation AT&T confirmed to have suffered a data breach last April, personal information of an unknown number of users was accessed by employees of one of its contractor.

AT&T has already notified some of its mobile customers of the data breach, Social Security numbers, birth dates and call records of an unknown number of users between April 9 and 21 were exposed.

AT&T sent a notice to the California Attorney General explaining the dynamic of the incident, the contractor’s employees who were responsible for the data breach were already terminated.

“We recently learned that three employees of one of our vendors accessed some AT&T customer accounts without proper authorization,” “This is completely counter to the way we require our vendors to conduct business.”

“We know our customers count on us and those who support our business to act with integrity and trust, and we take that very seriously,” AT&T continued. “We have taken steps to help prevent this from happening again, notified affected customers, and reported this matter to law enforcement.” AT&T said in an official statement.

It seems that the attackers were interested to request codes that can be used to unlock AT&T phones. An account could be unlocked by AT&T when the following conditions are respected:

the user’s account has been active for at least 60 days.
the account is in good standing.
the account has no unpaid balance.
the account has fulfilled his or her service agreement commitment.

“AT&T believes the employees accessed your account as part of an effort to request codes from AT&T that are used to unlock AT&T mobile phones in the secondary mobile phone market so that those devices can then be activated with other telecommunications providers.” reported AT&T in the notice.

AT&T, to preserve its customers, announced that it is offering affected accounts a year of free credit monitoring and is recommending that people change the passcode.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – AT&T, data breach)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.