AT&T to Pay $177 Million to Settle Two 2024 Customer Data Breach Class Actions
AT&T will pay a total of $177 million to settle two class-action lawsuits related to customer data breaches that took place in 2024. The agreement was approved on October 2 by Judge Sidney Fitzwater in the Northern District of Texas.
The settlement amount is divided into two separate funds: $149 million for the first breach and $28 million for the second. These sums will also cover attorney fees and administrative expenses. The company did not admit any fault or wrongdoing as part of the resolution.
The first breach was publicly disclosed on March 30, 2024, and impacted approximately 73 million people, consisting of 7.6 million current customers and 65.4 million former customers. The exposed records dated from 2019 or earlier and had appeared on the dark web. Compromised data included names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, account passwords, billing account numbers, and Social Security numbers for a portion of the affected individuals. AT&T stated it found no evidence of unauthorized access to its own systems.
The second incident originated from AT&T’s environment on the Snowflake cloud platform, with unauthorized access occurring between April 14 and 25, 2024. It affected nearly all mobile telephony customers and exposed phone numbers, counts of interactions, call durations, and cell tower identifiers. The records covered the period from May to October 2022, along with additional data from January 2, 2023. No Social Security numbers or the actual content of calls and messages were disclosed in this breach.
Under the terms of the settlement, eligible individuals may receive compensation of up to $5,000 for proven losses in the first case and up to $2,500 in the second case. The deadline for submitting claims was December 18, 2025.
Related articles
New Container, Old Code: Web Shell Persists Three Months in 1C-Bitrix Environment
Two 1C-Bitrix sites shared a web shell named WebShellOrb after an attacker exploited multiple vulnerabilities in a custom appeal application. The initial compromise went undetected because Nginx logs were retained for only one month, leading responders to conclude that no scanning activity remained visible. After agents showed no malicious code, administrators restarted the container without addressing the underlying issues in the shared filesystem and source code. The attacker regained access weeks later by reusing JWT tokens generated with a hardcoded secret and by exploiting SQL injection flaws that allowed password hash extraction. Shared system user accounts and a common filesystem volume enabled the shell to propagate between sites and survive container recreation. The incident highlighted that redeploying containers and rotating passwords failed to eliminate persistence rooted in unpatched code and misconfigured authentication logic.
How to Check If Your Passwords Have Leaked Online Using Have I Been Pwned
The article explains the common ways passwords end up exposed through site breaches, password reuse, or device infostealers. It details how to use the Have I Been Pwned service to check email addresses against known data leaks and the separate Pwned Passwords tool to verify if a password itself has appeared in dumps. Readers learn that absence from the database does not guarantee safety and that results must be interpreted by examining exactly which data fields were exposed. Practical steps include replacing reused passwords starting with email and financial accounts, enabling MFA or passkeys, terminating old sessions, and scanning devices for malware. The guide also recommends adopting a password manager and staying alert to login notifications. Overall it stresses that regular checks combined with unique credentials and multi-factor authentication form the most effective defense against credential stuffing and account takeovers.
Yandex Restores Access to 96% of Yandex Disk Data After Data Center Attacks
Yandex has recovered access to 96 percent of user data stored on Yandex Disk following attacks that damaged its data centers. Files including documents, photographs, and videos are once again available for opening, downloading, and sharing for the majority of users. The company continues to redistribute Disk capacity across independent external sites to improve overall resilience. Basic operations such as uploading, downloading, and synchronization are now functional, yet the web version still imposes restrictions on bulk actions like downloading entire folders or multiple files at once. Users are advised to rely on the desktop client or API for these tasks during the remaining recovery phase. Yandex publishes ongoing updates on the official Yandex 360 service status page and has not provided an exact date for full restoration.
k0t Operators Breach Corporate Firewalls and VPNs Exposing Over 70,000 Credentials
Group-IB and NyxLab detailed a campaign by the operator k0t targeting exposed firewalls and VPN portals. The operation collected more than 70,000 credentials from network devices and LDAP directory extractions across 84 compromised appliances. Initial access relied on CVE-2025-64446 directory traversal in FortiWeb, CVE-2026-0257 authentication bypass in Palo Alto GlobalProtect, and password brute-forcing against FortiGate devices. Attackers then leveraged CVE-2019-6693 to decrypt FortiOS configuration secrets and chained the noPac technique to reach domain administrator privileges. Persistence was achieved through MeshCentral, AdaptixC2, Atera, AnyDesk, and ngrok, while Rclone handled data exfiltration to cloud storage. Victims appeared on the Qilin and The Gentlemen leak sites, suggesting the operators likely act as initial-access brokers rather than direct ransomware affiliates.