Blumenthal and Hawley Press AT&T, Snowflake on Massive Data Breach
Senate Privacy Subcommittee Chairman Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and ranking member Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pressed AT&T and data cloud company Snowflake Tuesday for information by July 29 on an April data breach that exposed call and text records for nearly all…
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of AT&T’s wireless customers from mid-2022 (see 2407120033). “AT&T customers, including businesses and government entities, should be deeply concerned about this theft of private information about their communications,” Blumenthal and Hawley said in letters to AT&T CEO John Stankey and Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. “There is no reason to believe that AT&T’s sensitive data will not also be auctioned and fall into the hands of criminals and foreign intelligence agencies.” The breach “appears to have been easily preventable,” the lawmakers said: “While Snowflake, AT&T, and other clients have avoided taking direct responsibility, according to Mandiant, it appears that the cybercrime group behind the breaches obtained companies’ passwords from malware infections, including malware bundled with pirated software.” Blumenthal and Hawley also raised concerns about recent data breaches involving other Snowflake clients, including Ticketmaster. AT&T has “received the letter from Sens. Blumenthal and Hawley and will be responding to them,” a spokesperson emailed. Snowflake didn’t immediately comment.