How AT&T customers can protect themselves in the latest data breach

If you were an AT&T cellphone customer in 2022, your call data was possibly breached to bad actors.

If you were an AT&T cellphone customer in 2022, your call data was possibly breached to bad actors. AT&T said Friday that data was breached from “nearly all” of its cellular customers and the customers of wireless providers that used its network between May 1, 2022, and October 31, 2022. The records of a “very small number” of customers from January 2, 2023, were also breached, AT&T said. The company blamed an “illegal download” on a third-party cloud platform that it learned about in April — just as AT&T was grappling with an unrelated major data leak. AT&T listed approximately 110 million wireless subscribers as of the end of 2022. Here’s what that means for the millions of Americans that use AT&T’s cellular service. Hackers did not get any names, addresses or Social Security numbers. What they did get is metadata — call logs that contain a record of every number AT&T customers called or texted (including customers of other wireless networks), the number of times they interacted and the call duration. A cybercriminal could now identify relationships among phone numbers, a useful data point for hackers trying to make their scams more believable.