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thewayneAn unknown number of accounts were compromised by an AT&T third-party retailer, the number has not yet been disclosed but AT&T told California regulators in compliance of the law that they must be informed if a data breech involves more than 500 people.
"Employees of one of our service providers violated our strict privacy and security guidelines by accessing your account without authorization," the company said in a letter to affected customers. "AT&T believes the employees accessed your account as part of an effort to request codes from AT&T than are used to unlock AT&T mobile phones in the secondary mobile phone market."
Apparently the data was used to unlock phones so that they weren't exclusively bound to the AT&T network and could be used on T-Mobile, according to the article, or overseas. I question the article on this last point because the two networks, AT&T and T-Mobile, operate on different frequencies. Unless your phone is multi-band, it won't operate on the other network.
http://www.itworld.com/security/422883/att-says-customer-data-accessed-unlock-smartphones
In other news, Sprint & T-Mobile are talking about merging, which will make them collectively the third larges American cell carrier behind Verizon and AT&T. The thing that I find curious is a variation on why the proposed and rejected merger between AT&T and T-Mobile: their equipment is technically incompatible. At least with T-Mobile/AT&T, they were both GSM, just working on different frequencies. With Sprint/T-Mobile, they're different technologies: Sprint is CDMA (as is Verizon) and T-Mobile, as stated above, is GSM. So they're either going to maintain two different coverage networks and link them together somehow, which will have significant long-term increased operating costs, or one of the networks will be converted to the other tech at a significant one-time cost.
"Employees of one of our service providers violated our strict privacy and security guidelines by accessing your account without authorization," the company said in a letter to affected customers. "AT&T believes the employees accessed your account as part of an effort to request codes from AT&T than are used to unlock AT&T mobile phones in the secondary mobile phone market."
Apparently the data was used to unlock phones so that they weren't exclusively bound to the AT&T network and could be used on T-Mobile, according to the article, or overseas. I question the article on this last point because the two networks, AT&T and T-Mobile, operate on different frequencies. Unless your phone is multi-band, it won't operate on the other network.
http://www.itworld.com/security/422883/att-says-customer-data-accessed-unlock-smartphones
In other news, Sprint & T-Mobile are talking about merging, which will make them collectively the third larges American cell carrier behind Verizon and AT&T. The thing that I find curious is a variation on why the proposed and rejected merger between AT&T and T-Mobile: their equipment is technically incompatible. At least with T-Mobile/AT&T, they were both GSM, just working on different frequencies. With Sprint/T-Mobile, they're different technologies: Sprint is CDMA (as is Verizon) and T-Mobile, as stated above, is GSM. So they're either going to maintain two different coverage networks and link them together somehow, which will have significant long-term increased operating costs, or one of the networks will be converted to the other tech at a significant one-time cost.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-16 03:00 am (UTC)