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AT&T Says Customer Data Accessed To Unlock Smartphones

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-day-another-breach dept.

itwbennett writes: Personal information, including Social Security numbers and call records, was accessed for an unknown number of AT&T Mobility customers by people outside of the company, AT&T has confirmed. The breach took place between April 9-21, but was only disclosed this week in a filing with California regulators. While AT&T wouldn't say how many customers were affected, state law requires such disclosures if an incident affects at least 500 customers in California.

6 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Not doing it right by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would anyone give SSN to AT&T? Do they also process your taxes? If not, they have no place asking or retaining this information.

    1. Re:Not doing it right by rsmith-mac · · Score: 5, Informative

      Credit checks for post-paid accounts.

    2. Re:Not doing it right by Virtucon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah everybody want's your SSN and here's the trick folks, don't give it to them unless you absolutely have to. I'm finding it harder and harder these days to start to trust any companies with sensitive information like this. What's needed is an abstract number like a disposable e-mail address to start protecting our anonymity. Once it's used to verify if the customer is "sponge-worthy" it disappears and the requester can't use it again.

      I recently bought a new car at the same dealership where I'd previously purchased another one, about 5 years ago, and when going through all the paperwork found that they had my SSN and other financial data on file from the last time from that transaction. Needless to say I went ballistic and asked a few WTF questions of the management. They agreed that after the transaction was concluded that those details would be erased. I've since filed a complaint with the state attorney general, the state consumer affairs and the feds because none of this was disclosed 5 years ago and I don't know who has seen this data or my SSN.

      --
      Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
    3. Re:Not doing it right by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >>> Anyone that refuses to provide a valid SSN is rejected from our services. Your business is clearly contributing to the problem and should be held full liable for any damage resulting from the data breach that you will inevitably experience at some point.

      As to database designers that don't self generate uidis and instead use SSN...

      Still, there are ways around such obnoxious requests. my SSN is 123-4-5678.

    4. Re: Not doing it right by jd2112 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because we all knew terrorists wait up to 10 years after legally purchasing a vehicle before using it in an attack, right?

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  2. Hmmm ... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "We recently learned that three employees of one of our vendors accessed some AT&T customer accounts without proper authorization," the company said in a statement.

    "This is completely counter to the way we require our vendors to conduct business."

    So, if this is completely counter to how you require it, and they didn't have authorization ... why the hell is it set up so they can access it without proper authorization???

    If the access is set up to say "do you promise to not log in when you're not supposed to?" then the system is pretty much useless.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.