AT&T customer data hacked and company steps up

Hackers broke into an AT&T online store web site and accessed personal data including credit card information from “few than 19,000 customers”. AT&T said it alerted the major credit card companies and would provide credit monitoring. AT&T has been getting a lot of flack lately around privacy and data breaches. So it appears they did the right thing here from a PR perspective. Although it’s very disconcerting when a company like AT&T falls victim like this.

But allow me to ask a question. Was it just credit cards leaked or did customer SSN’s get breached too? If it’s just credit cards, then credit monitoring services, while a nice thing to provide for free, would be useless in the context of this fraud case. If all the accounts are closed, and all the hackers have are credit card numbers, then they can’t open new accounts and that is what credit monitoring can help detect. It’s a bit like giving antibiotics to someone who has the flu.

Read more here from the SF Chronicle.