The historic and international telecommunications company AT&T has announced a security breach. And this was an inside job. An employee allegedly comprised approximately 1,600 customers’ social security and driver license numbers.
A letter was sent to the Vermont attorney general. According to that letter, the breach happened in August 2014. The letter further states this employee violated strict rules and regulations by accessing account information without management’s knowledge or approval. The letter states the employee/hacker could see social security and driver license information and Customer Propriety Network Information (CPNI). What CPNI means is data collected by AT&T, or whoever the phone company may be, about customer’s telephone calls. This CPNI includes the time, date, phone number, even the customers’ phone subscription. It even knows the duration of each call on your phone bill. The kind of CPNI this letter talked about dealt with services customers buy from the company. This letter was composed by Mr. Micheal A. Chairmonte, AT&T’s director of finance and billing. The suspected employee no longer works for AT&T. They’re offering customers directly hit by the breach free credit monitoring and recommending customers change their passwords before anyone else gets hit.
Well, this is a good start, big emphasis on the word start. Now that we know 1,600 customers are being notified, they won’t release the name of the culprit.? We need to know who this hacker was. That’s a start. And it’s not enough that this anonymous person can be fired, which I’m glad he/she was. This hacker needs to be prosecuted and brought to justice. Maybe this is already happening. But until it does, this hacker will go to another company, or in his/her own privacy, and continue to compromise innocent people’s information. We’re just learning how many people may have been breached. The number could be even larger than 1,600. I have an idea: Shouldn’t the customers directly affected by this breach be entitled to a month of free service?