The shadow of past threats is once again hanging over millions of defenseless users.
Last weekend, a huge database was discovered on a cybercrime forum, affecting more than 70 million records allegedly stolen from the American telecommunications giant AT&T back in 2021.
According to Dark Web Informer, which first noticed the incident, the stolen files contain a wide range of personal information of the company's customers: from names, social security numbers and dates of birth to addresses, emails, phone numbers and other personal data. The exact number of entries in the dump is 73,481,539 rows.
Post dated March 17 from a hacker under the pseudonym MajorNelson
According to VX-Underground specialists, an independent check confirmed the authenticity of this data, and it really belongs to existing AT&T customers.
In August 2021, the ShinyHunters criminal group claimed to have gained access to the private information of 70 million AT&T customers and tried to sell this database in an auction format, where the starting price of the leaked database started at $ 200,000, and the established ceiling was fixed at $ 1 million.
At the same time, apparently, this archive with data was laid out in unlimited general access and distributed absolutely free of charge, which opens access to it to anyone who wants, and not just to dollar millionaires with malicious intentions.
As for the official position of AT&T on this issue, the company actively denied the fact of the leak back in 2021, claiming that the published information allegedly did not come from its systems, and the company's specialists did not record any hacking.
In response to the latest allegations of a possible data leak, AT&T reiterated that it "did not observe any signs of compromise of its systems," which is not surprising if the data is old.
Be that as it may, if the information in the dump is really authentic, and is now available to any hacker completely free of charge, AT&T users who were already customers of the company at the time of the old leak, now need to be especially vigilant against fraud, since any leaked information can be used by anyone for malicious purposes.
The incident raises questions about the security and confidentiality of personal data, as well as how companies protect their customers information from unauthorized access.
Last weekend, a huge database was discovered on a cybercrime forum, affecting more than 70 million records allegedly stolen from the American telecommunications giant AT&T back in 2021.
According to Dark Web Informer, which first noticed the incident, the stolen files contain a wide range of personal information of the company's customers: from names, social security numbers and dates of birth to addresses, emails, phone numbers and other personal data. The exact number of entries in the dump is 73,481,539 rows.
Post dated March 17 from a hacker under the pseudonym MajorNelson
According to VX-Underground specialists, an independent check confirmed the authenticity of this data, and it really belongs to existing AT&T customers.
In August 2021, the ShinyHunters criminal group claimed to have gained access to the private information of 70 million AT&T customers and tried to sell this database in an auction format, where the starting price of the leaked database started at $ 200,000, and the established ceiling was fixed at $ 1 million.
At the same time, apparently, this archive with data was laid out in unlimited general access and distributed absolutely free of charge, which opens access to it to anyone who wants, and not just to dollar millionaires with malicious intentions.
As for the official position of AT&T on this issue, the company actively denied the fact of the leak back in 2021, claiming that the published information allegedly did not come from its systems, and the company's specialists did not record any hacking.
In response to the latest allegations of a possible data leak, AT&T reiterated that it "did not observe any signs of compromise of its systems," which is not surprising if the data is old.
Be that as it may, if the information in the dump is really authentic, and is now available to any hacker completely free of charge, AT&T users who were already customers of the company at the time of the old leak, now need to be especially vigilant against fraud, since any leaked information can be used by anyone for malicious purposes.
The incident raises questions about the security and confidentiality of personal data, as well as how companies protect their customers information from unauthorized access.
