The American telecommunications company AT&T began to study the data published on the darknet about two weeks ago and preliminarily found that the leak affected approximately 8.6 million active account holders and 65.4 million former customers.
Reuters, citing an AT&T report, writes the leak occurred before 2019, but «has no evidence of unauthorized access to»’s systems. It is also unknown whether the data came directly from AT&T or from one of its suppliers.
The incident did not have a significant impact on the operation of the networks, according to the company, which has already reset passwords for 7.6 million active customers and is in contact with all victims.
AT&T’s network covers about 290 million people in the United States. Data leak includes names of the operator’s customers, their home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and social security numbers.
Last year in December, the largest Ukrainian operator «Kyivstar» suffered a large-scale cyberattack — Alexander Komarov, President of the company, called it «the world’s largest hacker attack on telecom infrastructure». It was noted that the first attempts to penetrate the system were made by hackers, probably of the Russian GRU Sandworm, back in March 2023. More than 24 million subscribers of the operator were left without communication and Internet for several days. To compensate for the losses, Kyivstar «Kyivstar» canceled the monthly subscription fee — it cost UAH 3.6 billion.
According to the State Service for Special Communications, the number of cyberattacks on Ukrainian companies, government organizations, and the security and defense sector in 2023 grew by 15.9%. In 2024, the attacks continued — in January data center affected «Park»services «Naftogaz», «Ukrposhta», and «Ukrzaliznytsia», as well as the border crossing system «Shlyakh», were partially down.