AT&T and Privacy Concerns: Insights into an Inclusive Colusion-Induced Call Number Retrieval Attack

Major data breachings have been reported by several companies this year, affecting millions of people.

The company said the US Justice Department determined that a delay in providing public disclosure was necessary due to the incident being discovered in April.

Those affected can follow an online process to obtain the phone numbers of their calls and texts in the downloaded data. Through the end of this year, you will be able to request that information from AT&T.

“While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number,” it cautions.

The company says that it will inform impacted users via text, email or U.S. mail, and that current and former customers can check the webpage to see if their information was involved.

And for those concerned about potential phishing and online fraud, it offers some evergreen advice, including not replying to a text from an unknown sender with personal details and making sure websites are secure by looking for the “s” after “http” in the address.

If customers detect any suspicious text activity on their AT&T wireless account, they should forward the message to the AT&T team.

When it discovered a data set on the “dark web” that was containing Social Security Numbers and other personal information of 70 million current and former account holders, it reset the password for about 7.6 million users.

The magnitude of this incident and AT&T’s accusation that it is the latest in a flurry of data thefts that resulted from attackers compromising organizations’ cloud accounts is significant. In the past few months, attackers have collected customers’ account credentials in order to take hundreds of millions of records from more than 150 clients of Snowflake, including LendingTree’s QuoteWizard.

Jake Williams is vice President of research and development at Hunter Strategy, he says this is really bad. The threat actors stole were call data records. These are a gold mine in intelligence analysis because they allow someone to understand networks—who is talking to whom and when. Data from previous compromises are used to map phone numbers to identities. But even without identifying data for a phone number, closed networks—where numbers only communicate with others in the same network—are almost always interesting.”