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The latest theft of digital information is massive beyond scale.
AT&T has reported that hackers stole six months' worth of call and text message records of nearly every AT&T cellular network customer.
This breach has the potential to reveal sensitive information about millions and millions of Americans.
The data contains records of calls and texts between approximately May 1 and Oct. 31, 2022, and on Jan. 2, 2023.
The company insists that content of the calls and messages was not compromised and customers' personal information was not accessed.
Yea, right.
Yet, AT&T concedes that the records did include phone numbers. Such information is often called metadata, which is information about communications, and considered highly sensitive especially when collected and analyzed at large scales to reveal patterns and connections between people.
"While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number," the company said in its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
AT&T's wireless network has 127 million devices connected to it, according to the company's 2023 annual report.
Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies and the director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told CNBC that metadata can reveal intimate details about people, though he cautioned that more needs to be learned about what hackers took from AT&T before a full picture of the threat will be clear.
"If you have somebody's metadata, you know when they go to work, where they go to work, where they sleep every night," he said.
Oh well, just another huge hack that compromises millions of Americans, opening them up to further scams, fraud, theft and even worse.
The digital world is out of control.
That's why they call it cyberspace.
Have a phone?
Expect your information and data within it to be compromised.
Here's to the days when landlines were all we needed.