AT&T has a confirmed that it suffered a data breach back in August, carried out by one of its own employees.
The now-former employee accessed personal information relating to an unspecified number of users (thought to be in the region of 1,600), such as their Social Security and driver’s licence info, along with customer metadata — including time, duration and destination of phone calls.
“We recently determined that one of our employees violated our strict privacy and security guidelines by accessing your account without authorization in August 2014, and while doing so, would have been able to view and may have obtained your account information including your social security number and driver’s license number,” wrote Michael A. Chiarmonte, AT&T’s director of finance billing operations.
As well as firing the individual responsible and notifying law enforcement officials, AT&T has offered a free one-year subscription to a credit monitoring service to those customers whose information may have been compromised.
“We take our customers’ privacy very seriously and value the trust they have in us,” AT&T said in a statement, sent to Cult of Mac. “Unfortunately, we recently learned that one of our employees did not follow our strict privacy rules and inappropriately obtained some customer information. This individual no longer works at AT&T and we are directly contacting the limited number of affected customers.”
This isn’t the first time AT&T has suffered a security breach. Just a few months earlier in June, the company confirmed that an unknown number of accounts had been accessed by a third-party looking for unlocking codes. Prior to that a group of hackers exploited a security flaw in AT&T’s website to steal more than 110,000 email addresses from iPad subscribers.
Source: Threatpost
Via: iDownloadblog
