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AT&T's massive data breach exposes sensitive information from thousands of customers
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Employees of call centers used by AT&T in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines breached access of the company's data. According to the government, sensitive information such as the names of their customers in the U.S. and their full or partial social security numbers were exposed, reported by the CNBC news. AT&T has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $25 million in order to settle the consumer privacy violations investigation of the Federal Communications Commission.
Highlights
Catholic Online (https://www.catholic.org)
4/9/2015 (1 decade ago)
Published in U.S.
Keywords: Telecommunications, Information, Data, Breach, Phone, Social Security, AT&T, Customer data
span style="line-height: 15.8599996566772px;">MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - "As the nation's expert agency on communications networks, the Commission cannot-and will not-stand idly by when a carrier's lax data security practices expose the personal information of hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Americans to identity theft and fraud," said Tom Wheeler, chairman of the FCC in a press release.
It was discovered that more than 68,000 accounts were improperly accessed and exposed by three call center employees in Mexico. Later in the investigation, they found that about 40 employees from call centers in Colombia and the Philippines had done the same and gained unauthorized access to about 211,000 client information.
The information breached is sold to interested third parties and used to unlock stolen cellphones they sell on secondary markets.
AT&T will also notify clients whose data was illegally accessed and will pay the customers whose data was breached in Colombia and the Philippines for credit monitoring services, as part of the company's settlement with the FCC.
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An agreement was reached that states the company will implement improvement programs with regards to their security and will regularly file compliance reports with the agency.
In an interview with the CNBC, an AT&T spokesman said that due to the malpractice, "as appropriate," they had been terminating some of their vendor sites.
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