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110 Million AT&T Call & Text Logs Stolen

110 Million AT&T Call & Text Logs Stolen

Last Friday, July 12th, Telecom giant AT&T revealed that they experienced a data breach impacting nearly all of their wireless customers. The company announced on April 19th, that “hackers exfiltrated records of customer call and text interactions from May 1, 2022 to October 31, 2022” and also on January 2, 2023.

AT&T is in process of notifying nearly 110 million account holders of the cyber crime. Compromised records identify other phone numbers their customers interacted with including call duration, text counts and numbers texted. Although the hacker reportedly demanded $1,000,000 ransom, SecurityWeek reported that approximately $370,000 in bitcoin was wired in May to prevent the data from getting leaked.

The U.S. telecommunications company said that the FBI is investigating and at least one person has been arrested after data was copied from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform, Snowflake. Snowflake is a company with 9,800+ global customers, including Adobe, Honeywell, Mastercard and Pfizer and has been in the news frequently of late. Learn More

Guard Well Identity Theft Solutions exists to provide you, your family and your employees from the damages of identity theft. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help or have any questions or concerns. We are available for you 24/7/365 at 888.966.4827 (GUARD) and [email protected].

Photo courtesy credit: markus-spiske-FXFz-sW0uwo-unsplash

Flying This Summer? How to Prevent Juice Jacking

Flying This Summer? How to Prevent Juice Jacking

Vacations are indeed wonderful. Traveling to a new destination or to a familiar favorite locale is a treasured experience with memories that can last a lifetime. On the other hand, traveling on business might not be as fun, but it is a must for many. Going from point A to point B can be stressful at times. Weather, flight delays, overbooked flights, long layovers or not having enough time between flights causing you to miss your next connection … you name it, it can happen. Next thing you know, your device battery is getting low. So, what do you do? Is it safe to recharge at a public charging station? Not always.

 

Juice jacking is a type of cyber attack and typically involves public USBs. Public charging stations, such as those found in airports, train stations, hotel lobbies, and even your rental car, can make your personal data very vulnerable and open your device up to malware.

 

As reported in Forbes, a growing number of nation-state hackers have been training their sights on travelers. New research from IBM, in the 2019 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, reveals that the transportation industry has become a priority target for cybercriminals as the second-most attacked industry — up from tenth in 2017. Since January 2018, 566 million records from the travel and transportation industry have been leaked or compromised in publicly reported breaches.”

 

What steps can you take to prevent juice jacking from happening to you?

– Don’t leave home without a fully charged battery.

– Carry a charging cord with you so you can use a wall socket instead of a public USB.

– Purchase an external battery pack.

– Turn off your phone to save your battery when feasible.

– Learn how to optimize your device’s battery settings.