AT&T confirms massive customer data leak

While leaks of customer information are always bad, the age of the data that ends up online should also be taken into account when judging the severity of such an event. Even more, such failures can help everyone learn a basic lesson when it comes to digital security and privacy: Changing passwords on a regular basis is never a bad idea, as long as they are also complex enough. Yesterday, AT&T confirmed that "data-specific fields were contained in a data set released on the dark web" surfaced online two weeks ago, but the information is at least five years old.

The data set mentioned above includes personal information such as social security numbers, AT&T account numbers alongside passcodes, as well as contact details. The preliminary analysis that was conducted by internal and external experts revealed that "approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former account holders" were successfully targeted. The current customers involved got new passcodes assigned automatically, but former ones will also be contacted by the company. For now, it is not yet clear if the source of the leak was AT&T or one of its vendors.

Ranked 13th on the Fortune 500 rankings for US companies, AT&T is also the world's fourth-largest telecom company by revenue, as well as the largest wireless carrier in the United States. This new development hasn't affected its performance on the stock exchange yet. After a brief period below $17 per share last month, AT&T is now trading at $17.6. According to data provided by IEX Cloud, the 52-week high and low values are $18.96 and $12.97, respectively. 

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