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.