AT&T says a massive trove of data impacting 71 million people did not originate from its systems after a hacker leaked it on a cybercrime forum and claimed it was stolen in a 2021 breach of the company.
BleepingComputer asked AT&T if it was possible the data came from a third-party service provider or vendor but has not received a response at this time.
That was my thought: AT&T didn’t get breached and leak the customer data of 71 million themselves. They merely sold that data to a third party who got breached and leaked the customer data of 71 million people.
They might have been better off claiming incompetence. OTOH, we already know AT&T is malicious from project Fairview, so perhaps in the end it’s better for PR to just stay in the malicious lane and not be regarded as both malicious and incompetent.
That was my thought: AT&T didn’t get breached and leak the customer data of 71 million themselves. They merely sold that data to a third party who got breached and leaked the customer data of 71 million people.
So this was pretty old and customers got notified by AT&T that it was a 3rd party vendor they were selling data to.
Okay, so it’s either:
They might have been better off claiming incompetence. OTOH, we already know AT&T is malicious from project Fairview, so perhaps in the end it’s better for PR to just stay in the malicious lane and not be regarded as both malicious and incompetent.