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Crooks Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers.
(krebsonsecurity.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I would posit it: 1) gross negligence on part of the "leadership" or/and 2) inside job by the staff
Article implies a third party did the job tho
Historically, how many of these days breaches have been linked to an inside person? The answer is almost none. Your first point is correct that someone (s) was likely was negligent, but your second point is tin foil bullshit. Maybe if there was any indication of foul play, the accusation has merit, but there's been none. Like almost all other breaches, it was likely a third party.
It would be nearly impossible to prove without inside knowledge...
However the fact that these breaches happen so often, would make one wonder how everybody is this "negligent" all the time.
There is a large economic incentive here BTW
But hey at least we can train AI with this data. Thank you for your service peasants.
Execs dindu nuffin mate just getting paid big bucks for "negligece"
Cyber security is a very complicated field. There are an infinite number of ways that someone could have breached security. It could have been and statistically was a social engineering attack.
There are software vulnerabilities all of the time that can be exploited for access. Recently SSH was discovered to be vulnerable across all Linux machines running at least a certain version of SSH. It didn't require the victim to do anything but be online.
Microsoft had a zero day that required no interaction that could give kernel level access to a users computer with them knowing.
Neither of those are likely the culprit, but ATT is a large company that has valuable data that hackers wouldn't mind putting extra effort into getting. At my current company that works with healthcare information, the number of attempts on us this year, that we are aware of, has more than tripled from all of last year.
Point being, some was probably negligent in that they clicked a bad link in an email, gave away something sensitive of a phishing call, or some other social engineering attack, because humans are often the weakest point in cyber security.