Us telecom giant AT&T suffered data leak, affecting 9 million customer accounts

CTOnews.com, March 12 (Xinhua)-- US telecom giant AT&T recently notified customers of a data breach, allowing attackers to obtain information related to their "device upgrade qualifications".

This serious security breach affected about 9 million customer accounts, which occurred in January 2023, when CTOnews.com noted that this was the same month that T-Mobile suffered a large-scale data breach, which affected about 37 million postpaid and prepaid accounts.

A representative of AT&T said in an interview that the incident leaked customer proprietary network information (CPNI), including data such as the number of lines on the account or wireless packages. In addition, personally identifiable information such as names, wireless accounts, wireless phone numbers and e-mail addresses are also disclosed. In some cases, the hacker also obtained other information about the customer, such as the amount paid per month, the amount expired, the name of the package, and the number of minutes charged and / or used per month.

According to a spokesman for AT&T, federal law enforcement agencies have been notified of unauthorized access to CPNI in accordance with Federal Communications Commission regulations.

Fortunately, the data breach did not involve credit card information, social security numbers or account passwords, and AT&T 's own system was not hacked. AT&T also confirmed that the vulnerability had been fixed, which is the first time that AT&T has faced such an event in a long time.