Last year, AT&T (T) sparked panic among customers when it made a few unsettling discoveries.
The telecom giant revealed that it suffered two massive data breaches in March and April last year. The one in March, according to AT&T, impacted over 70 million customers, exposing their sensitive information, such as social security numbers, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, to the dark web.
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The data breach in April involved hackers accessing AT&T’s Snowflake cloud workspace, compromising sensitive call and text logs of almost all of its phone customers. One of the hackers later claimed that AT&T even paid them a ransom of about $370,000 to erase the sensitive data they obtained from the breach.
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These data breaches made AT&T customers more susceptible to fraud, identity theft, and phishing attacks, causing the telecom giant to face several class-action lawsuits for the incidents.
AT&T later offered customers impacted by the data breaches one free year of credit monitoring, identity theft detection, and resolution services through Experian’s IdentityWorks service.
AT&TÂ data breaches made customers more susceptible to fraud, identity theft, and phishing attacks.
Image source: Mark Makela/Getty Images
AT&T suffers a major problem, impacting customers
Now, it appears that customers may want to renew that monitoring service once it expires, because once again, hackers recently leaked the data of about 86 million AT&T customers on the dark web.
The leaked information includes customers’ full names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and social security numbers, according to a recent report from HackRead.com.
This can be a significant threat to customers, since cybercriminals can package together the information, creating account profiles to commit identity theft and fraud.
AT&T told HackRead.com in a statement that the leaked data is from the data breach it faced in March last year and is conducting a “full investigation” of the situation.
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“It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to re-package previously disclosed data for financial gain,” said AT&T in the statement. “We just learned about claims that AT&T data is being made available for sale on dark web forums, and we are conducting a full investigation. After analysis by our internal teams as well as external data consultants, we are confident this is repackaged data previously released on the dark web in March 2024. Affected customers were notified at that time. We have notified law enforcement of this latest development.”
The data leak comes after AT&T revealed in its first-quarter earnings report for 2025 that it added 324,000 new postpaid phone customers and 261,000 new Fiber internet customers during the first few months of the year.
What AT&T customers can do protect themselves
Data breaches have been rapidly increasing across the country. According to a report from Identity Theft Research Center, the number of data breach victims during the first half of 2024 surpassed 1 billion, which is a 490% year-over-year increase compared to the first half of 2023.
There are several ways consumers can protect their information if they are affected by a data breach.
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First, consumers should quickly update their login information for bank accounts and PIN numbers for credit/debit card accounts, making sure they aren’t reusing passwords or PINs. Consumers should also consider using two-factor authentication for extra protection.
They should also closely monitor their bank accounts and credit reports for unusual activity. If consumers suspect fraud, they have the option to initiate a fraud alert with a credit bureau, which stays on your credit report for a year, but can be renewed or extended for a longer period of time.
Consumers can also obtain a free credit freeze, which limits access to their credit report.Â
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