Hilarious AT&T Breach Affects 73 Million
Yet another reason to shun post paid phone (dis) service.
Take a look at this screen shot, then watch the whole 2:12 report.
Why in the world was data for 65 million FORMER customers left sitting around where it could be stolen?
And the intruders got enough information to engage in ID theft on ONE IN FIVE Americans(!)
Commentary:
If you’re subscribed to this site but you don’t read the Tool Time material, which typically isn’t emailed, maybe you should have a look through there … once Substack finishes the repairs they’ve been working on for the last week.
What you’ll find with a search for phone specific articles will include:
Beach Blanket Bungo, 21st Century Style - cyberstalking involving SIM swap.
SIM Swap $17,300 Loss - just as it says.
Actual Phone Security Consult - someone who lurks the edges of Ukraine’s combat zone was in the market for some new devices.
New Mission, New Burner - I aggressively compartmentalize work and am similarly cautious with “the real me” in terms of devices.
Life At 128kbps - I ran a couple burners dry late last year and got stuck with ISDN like speeds, which was not the end of the world for me.
Burner Shuffle - migrating from one Android device to another and musing about employing long term, low cost, low bandwidth IoT SIMs for some phone/hotspot data.
GrapheneOS: Pondering Pixels - I don’t care for any of the Android devices I have and my iPhone recently misbehaved in the middle of a trip, causing much grief. The minute I’m sure I have a job for April, I’m going to move one SIM from a cheap prepaid to a Google Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS, which works in a fashion similar to Qubes for laptops/desktops.
Conclusion:
When the Soviet Union collapsed the KGB got entrepreneurial. Russia has been a nexus for cybercrime ever since and now we face the very real possibility that China will implode. We got some hard information on Myanmar’s Cyberslaves a couple weeks ago. Fraud is going to get nothing but worse.
I’ve been saying We’re Gonna Fight since 2017 and I was worrying about it clear back seven weeks after Obama was inaugurated. I think when the historians get to this period they’ll mark the start of our second civil war as January 6th, 2021. Since we don’t see cavalry squadrons in blue and gray, most of us can’t see it yet. We have multiple aggrieved ethnosectarian factions, a weakened, discredited central power, and we’re in a state of anocracy - that perilous transition zone between democracy and dictatorship. We might not see it, but the rest of the world certainly does.
Even if we pull back from the madness of Trump and his “just one day of dictatorship”, a significant portion of his followers are expecting a race war, a religiously motivated final battle, or some Qanon loony “save the mole children” purge of anyone with the wits to oppose such things.
I don’t like it, not one bit, but fourteen years of conflict with right wing hate groups have left me with correct judgment in these matters. You are all going to need to tighten up your stuff, and then pray to whatever power you recognize that the corporate entities you deal with aren’t as careless as AT&T has been.