AT&T phone records leak: widespread risk

From targeted wiretapping to massive surveillance networks, phone companies have been at the center of privacy concerns for decades. And their time in the spotlight isn't over yet. On Friday, communications giant AT&T announced a recent data breach that affected nearly all of its customers' call and text message records. The company is working to notify the roughly 110 million people affected.

AT&T said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it learned about the data breach on April 19. The attackers exfiltrated the data between April 14 and April 25. The company said in the SEC filing that the U.S. Department of Justice approved delays to disclosing the breach on May 9 and June 5, pending an investigation. AT&T added that it is working with law enforcement to apprehend those involved in the incident. At least one person has been arrested so far.

“This is really bad,” said Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy. “What the threat actors have stolen here is essentially call data records, which is a gold mine for intelligence analysis because it allows them to understand who is talking to who and when on the network. They are also matching phone numbers with identities from past breach data. But even without phone number identifying data, a closed network that only communicates with other numbers in the same network is almost always interesting.”

The incident is significant not only for its scale and impact, but also because AT&T says it's the latest in a series of astonishing data thefts that have occurred after attackers compromised the organization's Snowflake cloud accounts. Snowflake is a data warehousing platform where attackers have harvested customer account credentials in recent months and stolen hundreds of millions of records from approximately 165 Snowflake clients, including Ticketmaster, Santander Bank, and LendingTrees QuoteWizard.

The AT&T data is from both landline and mobile phone accounts and spans the period from May 1, 2022, to Oct. 31, 2022. The breach also involved a small number of records stolen from an undisclosed party dating to Jan. 2, 2023. The company said Friday that the trove of data does not include the content of calls or texts, nor the dates and times of communications. But the attackers made off with phone numbers and a trove of so-called metadata about calls and texts, such as who contacted whom, the duration of calls and a tally of a customer's total calls and texts. The trove also includes cell tower identification numbers, cell tower data that can be used to approximate the location of a cell phone when a call or text is made or received.

The data included records of people who were customers of mobile virtual network operators (MVOs) that had contracted with AT&T to use the company's network and infrastructure for their services. And, importantly, the reams of data stolen revealed that people who had no connection to AT&T were communicating with AT&T customers during the relevant time period.

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