Risk: Informational
19,000 AT&T customers have had their credit card details compromised by hackers.
According to AT&T, only customers buying products from its online store selling DSL Internet equipment were affected and it quickly shut down its online stores. Customers were notified by email, post and phone and AT&T has promised to refund fraudulent transactions to customers' cards.
This follows the recent story of crooks conning an AT&T service representative by asking for phone calls to be redirected. They called AT&T claiming to be a pizza outlet whose phone number was misfunctioning and asked for the calls to be diverted to a number that they chose. AT&T didn't make any checks and diverted the calls to the crooks' number.
Callers ordering pizzas then gave their credit card numbers to the crooks, which were then used to make fraudulent purchases online. The incident only came to light when the pizza outlet called AT&T to say that they weren't receiving any phone calls. AT&T says that it now employs "extra precautions" to prevent a similar incident occurring, but has declined to say what they are.