AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach

[touchdown]

AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in new data breach | TechCrunch

The stolen data includes 110 million AT&T customer phone numbers, calling and text records, and some location-related data.

techcrunch.com

AT&T’s told TechCrunch that the most recent compromise of customer records were stolen from the cloud data giant Snowflake during a recent spate of data thefts targeting Snowflake’s customers.

Snowflake allows its corporate customers, like tech companies and telcos, to analyze huge amounts of customer data in the cloud. It’s not clear for what reason AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake, and the spokesperson would not say.

 

[Creeper]

AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in new data breach | TechCrunch

The stolen data includes 110 million AT&T customer phone numbers, calling and text records, and some location-related data.

techcrunch.com

AT&T’s told TechCrunch that the most recent compromise of customer records were stolen from the cloud data giant Snowflake during a recent spate of data thefts targeting Snowflake’s customers.

Snowflake allows its corporate customers, like tech companies and telcos, to analyze huge amounts of customer data in the cloud. It’s not clear for what reason AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake, and the spokesperson would not say.

It seems to me AT&T should be required to tell customers why they store their data in snowflake and if they sold or allowed anyone else to analyze the data for any reason. Companies are too reckless with customer data and need to be reeled it.

 

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AT&T failed to test disastrous update that kicked all devices off network

AT&T caused outage that blocked 92 million calls, 25,000 attempts to reach 911.

arstechnica.com

 

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The FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau finds that the extensive scope and duration of this outage was the result of several factors, all attributable to AT&T Mobility, including a configuration error, a lack of adherence to AT&T Mobility's internal procedures, a lack of peer review, a failure to adequately test after installation, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network, a lack of controls to mitigate the effects of the outage once it began, and a variety of system issues that prolonged the outage once the configuration error had been remedied.

 

[Creeper]

I just got an official letter from Ticketmaster that they had a massive data breach and my personal info, along with thousands of other customers, was stolen. They suggest I take precautions to protect me against identity theft. I believe they offered a free protection service, but I assume it is for a limited time after which I would be expected to pay for it.

What is interesting to me is I don't recall using Ticketmaster in the last 10 years, maybe longer. Whatever credit card info that was stolen has to be obsolete by now.

IMO, companies should not keep personal info about customers once they have verified the payment. After that customers should have the option of requiring the company to purge this info off their systems. These data breaches are not going away, so if there is no data, then customers are protected. But companies that require customers to register as users on their systems, should be responsible for the protection of personal info forever.