"It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to re-package previously disclosed data for financial gain. We just learned about claims that AT&T data is being made available for sale on dark web forums, and we are conducting a full investigation.”
Translation: “We have no information whatsoever. Based on our complete lack of information, we feel confident is saying this isn’t our fault. This sort of leak could not have been foreseen by anyone, it’s not our fault. While we ‘investigate’, we’ll continue business as usual – taking in large sums of money, demanding all customer private information for even the most trivial service, store that PII insecurely, paying our C-Suite insane amounts of money for failing to keep customer data securely and claiming that there is nothing else we can do. Regards, Customer Service.”
I’ve already accepted my name, dob and ssn are already out there from other breaches. One thing I immediately did was freeze my credit. It’s a good safeguard to have
Everyone in America should freeze their credit with all three major credit reporting agencies.
Do it for your children also, even if they never used their credit for anything.
Breaches are part of life now.
Freeze chex and lexis nexus and those too. Keeps people from opening bank accounts in your name.
I never heard of these. Thank you for the info.
they made it easier to freeze on the big 3 credit bearaus, when it was much harder to do when the equifax breach happened.
Why does AT&T have customer SSNs?
I mean, I get that they need those in order to run credit checks… but once the credit check has been run they have no need to keep that data.
We need REAL data protection laws that make even the largest corporations afraid to keep user data for any longer than absolutely necessary.
ATT does financing for phones, etc. Presumably that is why.
Ok, so you need the SSN for the credit check and what else after?
To leak to criminals.
After phones became de-coupled from street addresses (landline), the whole system changed to do everything possible to identify who has what number. It may or may not have something to do with law enforcement requests for wire taps and metadata. You have to hand all this information over, even if you bring your own phone.
That said, burner phones with cash-paid SIMs are probably (?) still a viable workaround, however tedious.
You might as well start faking you ssn for companies like this since they can’t keep anything safe
Would that even work? Like have your actual social that you use for government services and a second made up ssn that you use for private companies? I think they cross reference and you’d get denied for a bunch of things.
Lawsuits incoming.
3.50$ incoming.
