New York (CNN) — AT&T has launched an investigation into the origin of a data breach involving the personal information of 73 million current and former customers in the United States.
In a press release on Saturday morning, the telecom giant said the data was “published on the dark web approximately two weeks ago” and contains information such as Social Security numbers of account holders.
The company added: “It is not yet known whether the data… came from AT&T or one of its providers.” “AT&T currently has no evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in the data set leak.”
The data appears to be from 2019 or earlier. According to AT&T, the leak does not appear to contain financial information or specific details about call history. The company said the breach shows that approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million previous account holders were affected.
AT&T said it is contacting customers and asking them to reset their account passwords. It also urges customers to remain alert about changes to their accounts or credit reports, adding that AT&T “will provide credit monitoring at our expense when appropriate.”
The company was alerted to the potential leak about two weeks ago. News of the leak was first reported by the X account vx-underground on March 17.
At the time, AT&T told CNN: “We have no indication that our systems are compromised. In 2021, we determined that the information provided in this online forum did not appear to come from our systems.” We believe and are working to confirm that the data set “Discussed today is the same dataset that has been recycled several times in this forum.”
