In This Story
AT&T said Friday that “nearly all” of its customers in 2022 had their data breached by one or more hackers.
The telecom giant reported that records of calls and texts between May and October of 2022 were illegally downloaded by “threat actors.” AT&T said it learned of the issue in April and has been working with cybersecurity experts to “understand the nature and scope of the criminal activity.” The company also said that only telephone numbers and cell site IDs were obtained by hackers — not other sensitive data, such as the content of texts, Social Security numbers and birth dates. AT&T didn’t guarantee that the hackers wouldn’t be able to find your name, though.
“We are working with law enforcement in its efforts to arrest those involved in the incident,” the company said in a statement Friday. “We understand that at least one person has been apprehended.”
AT&T subtly (or not so subtly) pointed out that a third-party cloud provider was compromised—not AT&T’s in-house servers. The telecom company said bad actors were able to access the data via its workspace on a separate cloud platform. Bloomberg reported that the platform in question is Snowflake.
“[T]his incident has not had a material impact on AT&T’s operations, and AT&T does not believe that this incident is reasonably likely to materially impact AT&T’s financial condition or results of operations,” AT&T said in an SEC filing.
By the numbers
242 million: Wireless AT&T customers in the U.S. as of 2023, according to Statista
6: Number of months in 2022 for which hackers have almost all AT&T customer call logs
$30 billion: AT&T revenues in the first quarter of 2024
1.14%: How much AT&T’s stock price fell after news of the hack