AT&T said a hacker stole call and text-message information covering almost all of its wireless subscribers.
The Wall Street Journal reports the cellphone carrier said that it hadn’t found evidence the data downloaded in April was shared publicly. The records, mostly from 2022, didn’t include personal subscriber information, such as names, credit-card data or Social Security numbers. However, leaked phone numbers are easy to tie to their owners using public databases, even without other identifying information. If published, the records could uncover private connections between individuals, such as confidential business meetings or extramarital affairs.
The hacker stole AT&T records accessed through an outside company’s cloud platform. The data didn’t include the content of calls or texts, nor did it have personal information like birth dates and Social Security numbers.
The stolen data showed the telephone numbers a customer contacted between approximately May and October 2022 and on Jan. 2, 2023, according to AT&T. The records also showed how many times those numbers were contacted and the total duration of calls over time. A subset of the data included details about cellular sites that could be used to determine users’ locations.
AT&T said it doesn’t believe the data was leaked to the public.
What should I do if I’m an AT&T customer?
AT&T subscribers affected by the hack, including former customers, can request until December that the company send them the phone numbers illegally downloaded from their records. For more information, check AT&T’s website.
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