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AT&T said it has begun notifying millions of customers about the theft of personal data recently discovered online.<\/p>\n
The telecommunications giant said Saturday that a dataset found on the \u201cdark web\u201d contains information such as Social Security numbers for about 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.<\/p>\n
The company said it has already reset the passcodes of current users and will be communicating with account holders whose sensitive personal information was compromised.<\/p>\n
It is not known if the data \u201coriginated from AT&T or one of its vendors,\u201d the company said in a statement. The compromised data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include financial information or call history, it said. In addition to passcodes and Social Security numbers, it may include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.<\/p>\n
While the data surfaced on a hacking forum nearly two weeks ago, it closely resembles a similar data breach that surfaced in 2021 but which AT&T never acknowledged, said\u00a0cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they assess this and they made the wrong call on it, and we\u2019ve had a course of years pass without them being able to notify impacted customers,\u201d then it\u2019s likely the company will soon face class action lawsuits, said Hunt, founder of an Australia-based website for warning people when their personal information has been exposed.<\/p>\n An AT&T spokesperson didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment Saturday.<\/p>\n It is not the first crisis this year for the Dallas-based company. An outage in February temporarily\u00a0knocked out cellphone service<\/a>\u00a0for thousands of U.S. users. AT&T at the time\u00a0blamed the incident<\/a>\u00a0on a technical coding error, not a malicious attack.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nSubscribe to the Eye on AI newsletter to stay abreast of how AI is shaping the future of business. Sign up<\/a> for free.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n