In this digital age, news of data breaches comes so regularly that I think we’ve perhaps all become a bit numb to it. Most of us are so thoroughly wired into The Matrix that it’s only a matter of time until we receive one of those emails advising us that our data has been hacked.
So, Friday morning’s news may not come as a shock to many, but it’s still pretty astounding in terms of its breadth. According to AT&T, records from nearly all of its cellular customers’ call and text messages from May to October of 2022, along with January 2, 2023, were stolen.
Hackers stole six months’ worth of call and text message records of nearly every AT&T cellular network customer, the company said Friday, a breach that has the potential to reveal sensitive information about millions of Americans.
The company said in an SEC filing that it learned from an internal investigation that in April, hackers “unlawfully accessed and copied AT&T call logs” that were saved on a third-party cloud platform.
The data contains records of calls and texts between approximately May 1 and Oct. 31, 2022, and on Jan. 2, 2023.
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Now, here’s the good news, if you can call it that: The content of the calls and messages was not compromised, nor was personal information — just the phone numbers themselves. Still, with 127 million devices connected to the network, that’s still a huge tranche of information — and one that industrious, nefarious sorts might still make use of.
“While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number,” the company said in its SEC filing.
The breach is being investigated.
The Justice Department and the FBI each said it is working with AT&T to investigate the hack. The FCC also said it had launched an investigation into the breach.
