The corporate stated it’s investigating with the assistance of inside and outdoors cybersecurity consultants, and has not decided but if the info got here from AT&T or one in every of its distributors.
“At present, AT&T doesn’t have proof of unauthorized entry to its programs leading to exfiltration of the info set,” the corporate stated in a press release.
The information seems to be from 2019 or earlier, and accommodates data from 7.6 million present AT&T account holders and about 65.4 million former account holders, AT&T stated.
The corporate stated it was notifying clients whose knowledge was leaked and would pay for credit score monitoring when relevant.
Many high-profile firms have suffered knowledge breaches, together with each of AT&T’s largest rivals. Verizon has seen a number of reviews of knowledge leaks over time, and T-Cellular has had at the least eight incidents since 2018, together with a 2021 occasion during which hackers stole the info of hundreds of thousands of consumers. This 12 months, a hack at a third-party firm could have uncovered the account data of American Categorical cardholders.
AT&T was thrust right into a harsh highlight final month when an enormous cellphone outage affected greater than 1.7 million clients and disrupted 911 companies in some states. The corporate stated it was brought on by a technical error, not a cyberattack.