AT&T notifies millions about data breach

The company stated that information discovered on the dark web includes social security numbers of current and former account holders

US telecommunications giant AT&T has begun informing millions of customers about the theft of personal data discovered online. The company announced on Saturday that a dataset found on the “dark web” includes information such as social security numbers for approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders. AT&T stated that it had already reset the passcodes of current users and would be contacting account holders whose personal information was compromised.

The company stated in a press release that it is unclear whether the data “came from AT&T or one of its vendors.” The compromised data, dated 2019 or earlier, does not seem to contain financial details or call logs.

In addition to passcodes and social security numbers, the data may include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates.

The data reportedly appeared on a hacking forum almost two weeks ago.

An AT&T spokesperson did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Saturday.

This isn’t the first challenge this year for the Dallas-based company. In February, an outage temporarily disrupted mobile phone service for thousands of US users. AT&T attributed the incident to a technical coding error, not a malicious attack.