I think that they realise that they can shift the burden of proof onto the accusers and call it a day. Unless the people behind the breach actually claim responsibility and allege it was AT&T that was breached, it's near impossible for anyone to prove them wrong.

The legal and PR teams just stick their heads in the sand. For example one could say "While there was unauthorized access there is no evidence that any personal information was taken." There's zero incentive to confirm the extent of PII leaks as it just triggers more liability and regulatory scrutiny.

This seems to me like it becomes securities fraud if they're lying due to new SEC cyber disclosure regs.

https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/gerding-cybersecurity-dis...

There will be no paper trail of them even looking, it's not lying if they don't see any proof and didn't look.

Someone is always unsophisticated enough to leave an email paper trail.

Everything is securities fraud so this is a low bar.

You're a securities fraud, you are!

Since there's no required data custody trail (hint, hint: should be required in privacy legislation!), we'll never know.

But I expect the simplest explanation is, as the article posits:

1) ATT contracts out portions of its business operations to third parties.

2. Those third parties, in the course of their business, require and have access to customer information.

3 - One of those third parties was breached.

#4 ATT may or may not know. (Or may deliberately be not-asking their contractor)

Presto! Security by ignorance!

Given the access to SSNs, I'd assume something to do with private credit scoring.

My guess, with AT&T being an enormous and ancient corporation long past it's glory days, is that internally its a stale mess serviced by people unwilling to dive into it.

The breach did happen, but things under the hood are so bad that they have no idea it happened. The layers of incompetence and don't-give-a-fuck completely obscure the evidence. The IT team, staffed mostly by young green cards who weren't even in this country 3 years ago, stare blankly at AT&T's internal auditing system developed in the 90's with a long dead and strictly proprietary language. Doesn't matter because the system didn't even catch the breach anyway. As you move up the chain, people just get more divorced from reality as they live in the delusion of AT&T still being a forefront technology company. So of course the breach didn't happen to them.

At least that it my theory.

Your theory is definitely plausible.

Source: Worked sometime for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of AT&T from a third world country.

Your theory is wrong.

I've sold and managed products that AT&T's various security organizations use organization wide and have helped them with some scares.

Without going too deep (and entering NDA breaking territory with ATT and former employers), I'll say I'm very confident about their internal security posture.

Also, a lot of the insinuations in your post are just plain racist and insulting.

Trust me, don't trust me. Idc. It's the internet.

So you are confident that they didn't leak this data?

Also, young green card in this context is synonymous with cost cutting. Young being inexperienced, green card being cheap. I apologize if you racially identify as green card.

You could have just said cheap and or inexperienced. Adding “green card” and the part about not being from here adds a layer of political and racial under tone even though green card isn’t necessarily a race.

When they called me curry girl it was a racist remark even though curry is not a race.

Green card/implication of foreign labor does add an extra bit of information beyond just inexperience - it's that they are likely to be less acquainted with the laws/regulations which means they can be convinced to do illegal things and are less likely to know their rights and stand up to bad/illegal treatment by their employer.

ATT is equally responsible for data leaks from companies they share data with.

Our company takes in data from others and their auditing is rigorous. It's not much of a better look to be seen handing out customer data willy-nilly.

> ATT is equally responsible for data leaks from companies they share data with.

Liability from 3rd party breaches are avoided if the 3rd party has shown that they did their due diligence in maintaining their security.

If they show that they are in SOC 1/2 compliance along with other similar compliance frameworks, that is enough.

> auditing is rigorous

Having dealt with and seen this from SMEs to F10s I guarantee you it's nowhere near as rigorous as you expect, and that this is a common issue across all organizations - even some darlings on HN that people view as deeply technical.

Everyone has their pants off.

That is correct. This kind of large legacy company has zero engineering culture. Engineering is not rewarded nor empowered to do its job well and is sometimes seen as a threat (engineering working too wall = entire departments could become redundant), which means nobody competent joins/stays there and only mediocrity remains.

Theory: AT&T has a known relationship with the NSA. Maybe the leak was due to an NSA screw-up. In that case, they're telling a half-truth but wouldn't be allowed to tell the whole truth.

Theory: Someone at AT&T suffered a traumatic brain injury, posted all this data, forgot about it, quit, and is now living in a cottage somewhere in the mountains of Canada.

Fake news. A Texan can't survive the freezing winters in Banff. /s

The NSA screwed up and it ended up in the hands of someone who routinely hacks into large corps?

This doesn’t pass the basic smell test. I really don’t want HN to fall down the conspiracy hole that much of the internet now has. It’s eating away at our societal fabric and is wrong 99.9% of the time.