US telecommunications big AT&T says it has began notifying hundreds of thousands of shoppers in regards to the theft of private knowledge not too long ago found on-line.
The corporate mentioned Saturday {that a} dataset discovered on the “darkish net” comprises data resembling social safety numbers for about 7.6 million present AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.
AT&T mentioned it had already reset the passcodes of present customers and will probably be speaking with account holders whose private data was compromised.
It’s not recognized if the information “originated from AT&T or considered one of its distributors”, the corporate mentioned in a press release.
The compromised knowledge is from 2019 or earlier and doesn’t seem to incorporate monetary data or name historical past, it mentioned.
Along with passcodes and social safety numbers, it might embody e mail and mailing addresses, telephone numbers and delivery dates.
It’s understood the information surfaced on a hacking discussion board practically two weeks in the past.
An AT&T spokesperson didn’t instantly return a request for remark Saturday.
It’s not the primary disaster this yr for the Dallas-based firm. An outage in February briefly knocked out cell phone service for hundreds of US customers.
AT&T on the time blamed the incident on a technical coding error, not a malicious assault.