AT&T notifies users of data breach; resets millions of passcodes

Telecom giant says data released onto ‘dark web’ about two weeks ago

DALLAS — Personal data from about 73 million current and former AT&T account holders has been leaked on the dark web, the telecom giant said Saturday.

The Dallas-based company said the data were released onto the dark web about two weeks ago, and officials are not sure yet whether the data originated from the company or one of its vendors.

“With respect to the balance of the data set, which includes personal information such as Social Security numbers, the source of the data is still being assessed,” officials wrote in a news release.

AT&T officials said the company has launched an investigation with cybersecurity experts. In their initial analysis, staff found the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, affecting about 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

Company officials noted they don’t have evidence at this point of unauthorized access to their systems.

“The company is communicating proactively with those impacted and will be offering credit monitoring at our expense where applicable,” officials wrote.

Anyone who has been affected will get an email or letter from the company.

AT&T officials said the incident had not had a material effect on the company’s operations Saturday. Customers have received emails noting that their account passcode has been compromised and that they must reset it.

“It appears the data is from more than 4 years ago and does not contain personal financial information or call history,” AT&T wrote to customers.

In the email, the company notes the information may have included customers’ full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, Social Security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode.

If sensitive personal information was compromised, the company said it will provide “complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services.”

The dark web leak comes a month after the company suffered a nationwide outage in its cellular service for a day. The company blamed the outage on a coding error and not a cyber attack.

“The real issue here is the fact that basically all the personal identifiable information that you would need to basically recreate a person in the cyberspace was leaked,” said Andrew Sternke, the CEO of Southlake-based DarkBox Security Systems.