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From focused wiretaps to bulk surveillance dragnets, telephone firms have been on the heart of privateness considerations for many years—and their time within the limelight is not over but. On Friday, telecom large AT&T announced that it just lately suffered a knowledge breach impacting name and textual content messaging information of “almost all” its prospects. The corporate is within the technique of notifying about 110 million folks that they had been affected.
AT&T stated in a US Securities and Alternate Fee filing that it discovered concerning the knowledge breach on April 19. Attackers exfiltrated knowledge between April 14 and April 25. The corporate stated in its SEC submission that the US Justice Division licensed delayed disclosure of the breach on Might 9 and once more on June 5, pending investigation. AT&T added that it’s “working with regulation enforcement in its efforts to arrest these concerned within the incident.” Thus far, “at the least one particular person has been apprehended.”
“Yeah, that is actually unhealthy,” says Jake Williams, vp of analysis and improvement on the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Technique. “What the menace actors stole listed here are primarily name knowledge information. These are a gold mine in intelligence evaluation as a result of they permit somebody to grasp networks—who’s speaking to whom and when. And menace actors have knowledge from earlier compromises to map telephone numbers to identities. However even with out figuring out knowledge for a telephone quantity, closed networks—the place numbers solely talk with others in the identical community—are nearly at all times attention-grabbing.”
The incident is important not solely due to its sheer scale and attain however as a result of AT&T says it’s the newest in a staggering spate of data thefts that resulted from attackers compromising organizations’ Snowflake cloud accounts. Snowflake is a knowledge warehousing platform, and attackers collected its prospects’ account credentials in latest months to steal hundreds of millions of records from about 165 Snowflake purchasers, together with Ticketmaster, Santander financial institution, and LendingTree’s QuoteWizard.
The AT&T knowledge is from each landline and mobile accounts and spans Might 1, 2022, to October 31, 2022. A smaller, undisclosed variety of folks additionally had information from January 2, 2023, stolen within the breach. The corporate stated on Friday that the information trove “doesn’t include the content material of calls or texts” and doesn’t embrace the date and time of communications. However attackers did make off with telephone numbers and an enormous quantity of so-called “metadata” about calls and texts, together with who contacted whom, name durations, and tallies of a buyer’s complete calls and texts. The trove additionally consists of some cell website identification numbers—primarily cell tower knowledge that can be utilized to approximate a cellphone’s location when it made or obtained a name or textual content.
The information consists of some information of people who find themselves prospects of telephone carriers—referred to as “cell digital community operators”—that contract with AT&T to make use of the bigger firm’s networks and infrastructure for his or her service. And, crucially, the stolen trove exposes individuals who don’t have any relationship with AT&T once they communicated with an AT&T buyer through the related time spans.
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