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AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

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Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#181

Post by sbarre »

orochimaaru wrote: post #138
zsdfgyn wrote: post #126

Key point of the article: "Snowflake allows its corporate customers, like tech companies and telcos, to analyze huge amounts of customer data in the cloud. It’s not clear for what reason AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake, and the spokesperson would not say." Finally journalists are asking the question why customer data must be stored with third party cloud providers. AT&T is a long way from Bell Labs, shame…

All companies use third party cloud providers. A lot of legacy companies have been shutting down data centers to move to the cloud. So there isn’t a question of whether why your data is in the cloud. It’s going to be in the cloud.

And honestly, I think I'd rather trust cloud providers with the data than the remnants of a decimated IT team in a large enterprise that's struggling to maintain their own on-prem infrastructure that's super old and probably not up to date on patches.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#182

Post by nashashmi »

squeegee_scream wrote: post #177

It's ok everyone! Protecting our data is one of AT&T's top priorities. > Protecting your data is one of our top priorities. We have confirmed the affected access point has been secured. > We hold ourselves to a high standard and commit to delivering the experience that you deserve. We constantly evaluate and enhance our security to address changing cybersecurity threats and work to create a secure environment for you…

Not their fault. Snowflake was breached. And the data was with Snowflake.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#183

Post by rightbyte »

throwaway120724 wrote: post #165

There's no way to make the software perfectly safe from hackers and from social engineering. So, yes, companies should be more careful with the data and, yes, the data shouldn't be kept forever. I agree companies should be doing more to protect the data. I see lots of outrage at the companies and why isn't the government doing more to punish them and how do I get compensated ... But, I feel like everyone is blaming t…

> But, I feel like everyone is blaming the victim. Is it the home owners fault when someone breaks in and steals stuff?

> Where's the outrage at the hackers breaking into these accounts?

The internet is essentially every hooligan in the world about to kick in your dooor. So yes, I blame the home owner.

It seems silly to me to condemn anonymous users of the internet.

Back in the days when nothing of importance was done on the internet the view was way more healty.

If you have sensitive data, don't expose it to the hooligans. Easy as that.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#184

Post by stevetron »

AT&T bought into a significant amount of DirecTV - so much so that everything that had the DirecTV logo on it was changed to the AT&T logo, such as the invoicing. So the AT&T customer base has included, for several years, the Directv customer base. The article doesn't attempt to clarify who the 'nearly all' customers are, and some people will jump to the conclusion that it is the cell phone customers. But it could include the DirecTV customer base whose data is also at risk.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#185

Post by nashashmi »

jader201 wrote: post #84
smcin wrote: post #70

AT&T stock has already bounced back from much of the initial -2.6% drop this morning, so the market thinks AT&T is immune. Meanwhile Snowflake is -3.9% down (they have many other customers than AT&T). https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/T https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/SNOW

I never got the impression that the market ever cares about data breaches. It seems most companies are rarely held financially responsible for data breaches anyway. I would bet any effects you’re seeing in stocks is unrelated to this news.

Insurance takes up a lot of the fallout from data breaches.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#186

Post by xyst »

squeegee_scream wrote: post #177

It's ok everyone! Protecting our data is one of AT&T's top priorities. > Protecting your data is one of our top priorities. We have confirmed the affected access point has been secured. > We hold ourselves to a high standard and commit to delivering the experience that you deserve. We constantly evaluate and enhance our security to address changing cybersecurity threats and work to create a secure environment for you…

The “fine” will consist of a class action lawsuit that will eventually (3-4 years later) be bargained down to 1/2 the original claim. Lawyers take their 25% (or whatever cut was negotiated) fee. Then the impacted customers (assuming they submitted all of the claim paperwork) get paid out a few dollars.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#187

Post by metabagel »

throwaway120724 wrote: post #165

There's no way to make the software perfectly safe from hackers and from social engineering. So, yes, companies should be more careful with the data and, yes, the data shouldn't be kept forever. I agree companies should be doing more to protect the data. I see lots of outrage at the companies and why isn't the government doing more to punish them and how do I get compensated ... But, I feel like everyone is blaming t…

> There's no way to make the software perfectly safe from hackers and from social engineering.

This is a straw man argument. Companies should use best practices in order to prevent most intrusions. When they do not, as in this case, criticism is warranted.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#188

Post by darby_nine »

jader201 wrote: post #84
smcin wrote: post #70

AT&T stock has already bounced back from much of the initial -2.6% drop this morning, so the market thinks AT&T is immune. Meanwhile Snowflake is -3.9% down (they have many other customers than AT&T). https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/T https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/SNOW

I never got the impression that the market ever cares about data breaches. It seems most companies are rarely held financially responsible for data breaches anyway. I would bet any effects you’re seeing in stocks is unrelated to this news.

I'm certainly not going to defend negligence of data protection but it's extremely difficult to cost as a liability (naively, you might even consider it not a liability at all) without government oversight.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#189

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #111
Aaronstotle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not Snowflake's fault their customers used weak passwords and no MFA. Not enforcing MFA does merit some blame on Snowflake, however, I still think its on the customer to secure your own environment.

Totally, way too many people are trying to blame snowflake. ATT is a technology infrastructure company. Secure transmission of data is one of their core business competencies (theoretically). They are a corporation that we trust to handle incredibly sensitive info. Call records are, in fact, incredibly sensitive data. They should be telling Snowflake what best practices to be using, not the other way around!

> Totally, way too many people are trying to blame snowflake.

Well the _actual_ compromise started from one of their employees, so it's pretty unsurprising that they're getting (some of) the blame.

Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

#190

Post by al_borland »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #113
graybeardhacker wrote: post #104

Freeze your credit people! It's super easy. It's not a perfect fix but it's so trivial to do and it will help. https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze You can unfreeze through an app whenever you want/need to.

Is there any reason not to keep credit frozen permanently , only unfreezing it when you're making a large purchase that requires it?

This is how I have operated ever since the Equifax breach. Once that happened, none of the others seemed to matter, everything important for identity theft is out there.

I've had no problems. Someone will try to run my credit, it will fail, then I ask which one they're trying to use, and I unfreeze it for a day. Some of them have the option to unfreeze for a single pull with a 1 time code (if I remember correctly), but when I tried to use that the person trying to pull the report seemed clueless, so I had to do the 1 day unfreeze.

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