It seems that hackers and cyber bullies are getting a lot of nerve these days, so they go after larger and larger companies. If you remember the news in May, we alerted everybody to change their eBay passwords, as over 140 million user accounts have been hacked.

Also in May we reported that Spotify got hacked and all Android users were urged to keep their eyes peeled for patches. Luckily, in both these past cases, no severe damage has been done.

Unfortunately, serious threats are now hanging above the heads of AT&T users, whose social security numbers and dates of birth, among others, have been stolen in a hacking scheme.

Let’s see this story from its beginning. The AT&T data breach didn’t take place yesterday, but between April 9 and April 21. The cyber attack wasn’t performed by some secret hacking society, but by three employees of one of the company’s vendors. According to the news, the AT&T data breach was reported only last Friday and the company officials didn’t disclose the exact number of accounts that have been hacked.

An official AT&T statement explains what happened:

We recently learned that three employees of one of our vendors accessed some AT&T customer accounts without proper authorization. This is completely counter to the way we require our vendors to conduct business. We know our customers count on us and those who support our business to act with integrity and trust, and we take that very seriously. We have taken steps to help prevent this from happening again, notified affected customers, and reported this matter to law enforcement.

If you are an AT&T user and you received a snail mail telling you that you have been affected by the AT&T data breach, the wisest thing you can do is watch out for anything remotely fraudulent happening to your credit card, banking details and so on. A full change of passwords and supplementary safety measures are also in order. The carrier announced all its hacked customers they would receive one year of credit monitoring services free of charge.

There is also an official letter AT&T sends to its customers you might want to read top to bottom if you are an AT&T user. So far, there are few details missing out of the picture, but we’re sure we will find out about them at some point. Briefly, there are at least two questions that beg for an answer:

1. Why did AT&T wait almost two months before reporting the security breach to the authorities?

2. What happened to the three employees responsible for this fraudulent act? Were they identified / caught / arrested?

What is of utmost importance right now is for you to check for any sign of suspect activity related to your social security number in case you feel you might have been hacked.