ANGRY customers are demanding compensation after news of AT&T’s data breach emerged last week.
A lawsuit filed against the Dallas-based telecommunications company last Friday night, July 12, alleges that AT&T was not transparent about the severity of the breach and did not safeguard important customer data.
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Over 100 million customers were affected by the data breach after AT&T discovered an “illegal download”.
The lawsuit alleges that leaked information is at risk of being used by ill-intentioned parties to “commit identity or financial fraud.”
The suit was filed by Dina Winger, a loyal customer of the company for the past 15 years.
This is the first lawsuit that has been filed against AT&T in Dallas since news on the breach came out last week.
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The data leak occurred between April 14 and April 25 this year, but customers were only told about the breach about three months after the incident – at the end of last week.
The logs hackers accessed dated from May 1 to October 31 2022, as well as some from January 2023.
“So AT&T says it happened between May through October 2022! And they’re only NOW saying it happened?” one angry X, formerly Twitter, user wrote.
According to AT&T, a “threat actor” managed to access company workspaces, taking six months of call logs.
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The hacker managed to obtain the data on Snowflake, a third-party cloud platform.
Because of this breach, the data of “nearly all” AT&T cellular customers was compromised.
The leaked information is no longer publicly available, according to AT&T, but they say phone numbers can still be traced to individuals.
The company reportedly paid over $300,000 in Bitcoin to one of the hackers in May to delete the stolen data.
At this point in time, AT&T say that they are still unclear on how much of their customers’ data is still vulnerable.
This has forced people to freeze their credit card accounts – an unfair burden on customers the lawsuit claims.
Since the news of this major security breach, people have been looking at ways to prevent this happening to them.
People should try and avoid using variations of the same password when making new ones or resetting old ones says Lisa Plaggemier, the executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance.
“You really need to change that. Bad guys know that we have a habit of recycling passwords,” she said.
Plaggemier also urged people to use multi-factor authentication setup for all of their accounts.
“AT&T alone was, and is, in a position to protect against the harm suffered… as a result of the Data Breach,” it says.
Whatever the outcome of this lawsuit is, the scale of the breach means that it is unlikely to be resolved quickly or cheaply.
“I think this is a pretty unique case, and so it’s pretty hard to say how much (AT&T) should be accountable for,” said Patrick Yarborough, a lawyer representing Winger.
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“If you’re talking about as many as 100 million people, it’s hard to even talk about what a settlement or a verdict would look like.
“But let me tell you, it’s in the B-Billions. No question,” he said.
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https://www.the-sun.com/news/11958660/att-data-breach-settlement-payment/