Millions of AT&T customers exposed in data breach, cyber expert talks security, privacy

ATLANTA — On Friday, telecommunications company AT&T revealed that they’d been the victims of a hack in 2022, and that the personal data for almost every one of their customers was illegally downloaded off of their cloud servers.

Everything from individual phone numbers to who you called or texted was taken as part of the data, including how many times you spoke to each person.

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While AT&T does not believe the data has been made publicly available, consumer advocates are warning customers to keep an eye on their credit reports and to change their account passwords.

Now that we know tens of millions of AT&T cellphone customers were exposed, as well as many non-AT&T customers, in the massive data breach, Channel 2′s Jorge Estevez spoke to Kennesaw State University Assistant Professor Dr. Andy Green, a cyber security expert, to learn more about how this happened, and what it means for the users impacted.

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Green said the issue was bigger than just AT&T.

“AT&T used a third-party vendor named Snowflake to house data to do research on, and Snowflake offers the same service to a large number of firms across the planet,” Green said. “As of now, we know of approximately 165 different clients whose data was compromised that was sitting in the Snowflake infrastructure for their company.”

Green told Channel 2 Action News that in cases where more people have your phone number, the danger goes beyond just getting spam calls.

“It’s bad because the depth and the breadth of the data that was stolen, it was text messages. It was geolocation. It’s also phone records,” Green said. “All of that can be used by threat actors to use in an attack on an individual to set up a credit card, a bogus credit card, take out a loan. Things of that nature attack you via SMS, phishing, all of that.”

The assistant professor also said it’s important to protect your accounts, especially because now that the data is out there somewhere, it can get ugly.

“AT&T has let you down again. It’s not the first time. So you want to monitor your accounts. You want to implement credit freezes via the credit bureaus, and you want to use a third-party app to monitor your accounts on a daily basis and to get alerted when, and if, new ones are created,” Green said.

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