Text meta data is an important distinction Still not good, but headline feels clickbait if I think my text messages leaked
That's still pretty gnarly in terms of social graphing though.
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
#272"While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number"
In other words, your phone number and name is likely in a public record somewhere. It's not that private.
The info leak should not have happened but in the grand scheme of things it's not that big a deal. "The content of the calls and messages was not compromised." The worst it does is reveal who has been sending messages to or calling each other.
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#273Big breaches like this are gonna be wild with advanced GenAI. Combing through the shit for the diamonds provided some degree of limitation on the impact of big breaches in the past but all those calls are going to be accurately transcribed and mined by AI and the attackers are going to have a buffet of products and targets laid at their feet.
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#274My first question is: why was the data being stored by a third party in the first place?
Shouldn't data like this be stored completely independently of the Internet? Yes, I realize that does not guarantee it is secure since there has to be some point of access. On the other hand, it would reduce opportunities for people to breech the databases.
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#275You would effectively be able to cross reference this meta data with 2 factor authentication services. It’s probably time to start removing this option entirely.
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#276This happened in 2022 and they're just disclosing it now? Or did they just find out about it, which is maybe even worse?
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#277These are all security nightmares aren't they? It smells as if all the resources went into delivering billing, then barely enough for technically working service, and then is there even anything leftover for security (instead of this being part of the foundation of a service)?
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#278My first question is: why was the data being stored by a third party in the first place? Shouldn't data like this be stored completely independently of the Internet? Yes, I realize that does not guarantee it is secure since there has to be some point of access. On the other hand, it would reduce opportunities for people to breech the databases.
Because they don't care about actual information security, they care about "national security." They optimize for giving all branches of US law enforcement, from the federal to state to local level, access to 7 years of historical data whenever they claim they need it.
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
AT&T is well known for working with NSA — 33 Thomas St [1] [1] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
That doesn't excuse this. If these records only existed so they could give them to the NSA at a later time, that further illustrates the dangers of accommodating the agency's desire for access to data generated from the U.S. Telecom backbone.
If they are obligated to give the data to the NSA, they should give it to them in real time and then delete their own logs as soon as they no longer need them.
Re: AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
AT&T is well known for working with NSA — 33 Thomas St [1] [1] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
That doesn't excuse this. If these records only existed so they could give them to the NSA at a later time, that further illustrates the dangers of accommodating the agency's desire for access to data generated from the U.S. Telecom backbone.
It does explain it though. By coincidence they also get billions of dollars in federal subsidies