Data from 73M current, past customers leaked on dark web: AT&T

The telecoms giant announced on Saturday that a data breach had resulted in information for some 73 million current and past AT&T customers being uploaded on the dark web.  

The Dallas-based business stated in a statement, "AT&T has determined that AT&T data-specific fields were contained in a data set released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago." 

According to AT&T, the impacted data set looks to be from 2019 or before and affects roughly 65.4 million former account holders and 7.6 million current consumers.  

According to AT&T, the data package containedprivate data such Social Security numbers. The company stated that it is unknown if the data came from AT&T or one of its suppliers. 

"With the assistance of both internal and external cybersecurity, AT&T has initiated a thorough investigation." 

In a note to customers, the company said that a "number" of AT&T passcodes have been compromised and that it reset the passcodes for all impacted current customers. 

"In addition, we will be communicating with current and former account holders with compromised sensitive personal information," the company said. 

The compromised data does not appear to contain personal financial information or call history, AT&T said. 

TechCrunch reported that it had informed AT&T on Monday that the leaked data contained encrypted passcodes that were easy to decipher. 

This is not the first time the company has experienced issues this year. In February, an outage temporarily knocked out cellphone service for tens of thousands of customers in the U.S. The network disruption was caused by a software update, the company said at the time.