AT&T Says Customer Data Accessed To Unlock Smartphones

itwbennett writes: Personal information, including Social Security numbers and call records, was accessed for an unknown number of AT&T Mobility customers by people outside of the company, AT&T has confirmed. The breach took place between April 9-21, but was only disclosed this week in a filing with California regulators. While AT&T wouldn't say how many customers were affected, state law requires such disclosures if an incident affects at least 500 customers in California.

Not doing it right

[sinij]

Why would anyone give SSN to AT&T? Do they also process your taxes? If not, they have no place asking or retaining this information.

Re:Not doing it right

[Virtucon]

Yeah everybody want's your SSN and here's the trick folks, don't give it to them unless you absolutely have to. I'm finding it harder and harder these days to start to trust any companies with sensitive information like this. What's needed is an abstract number like a disposable e-mail address to start protecting our anonymity. Once it's used to verify if the customer is "sponge-worthy" [urbandictionary.com] it disappears and the requester can't use it again.

I recently bought a new car at the same dealership where I'd previously purchased another one, about 5 years ago, and when going through all the paperwork found that they had my SSN and other financial data on file from the last time from that transaction. Needless to say I went ballistic and asked a few WTF questions of the management. They agreed that after the transaction was concluded that those details would be erased. I've since filed a complaint with the state attorney general, the state consumer affairs and the feds because none of this was disclosed 5 years ago and I don't know who has seen this data or my SSN.

Re:Not doing it right

[sinij]

>>> Anyone that refuses to provide a valid SSN is rejected from our services. Your business is clearly contributing to the problem and should be held full liable for any damage resulting from the data breach that you will inevitably experience at some point.

As to database designers that don't self generate uidis and instead use SSN...

Still, there are ways around such obnoxious requests. my SSN is 123-4-5678.

Re: Not doing it right

[jd2112]

Because we all knew terrorists wait up to 10 years after legally purchasing a vehicle before using it in an attack, right?