AT&T notifies users of data breach and resets millions of passcodes

DALLAS– BEE&T said it has begun notifying millions of customers about the theft of personal data recently discovered online.

The telecommunications giant said on Saturday that a dataset found on the ‘dark web’ contains information such as social security numbers for about 7.6 million current A.T.&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

The company said it has already reset current users’ passcodes and will communicate with account holders whose sensitive personal information has been compromised.

It is not known whether the data “comes from AT&T or any of its suppliers,” the company said in a statement. The compromised data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include any financial information or call history, the report said. In addition to access codes and social security numbers, it may also contain email and postal addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth.

It’s not the first crisis this year for the Dallas-based company. Temporary outage in February cell phone service turned off for thousands of US users. BEE&T at the time blamed the incident to a technical coding error, not a malicious attack.