Call and text records of nearly all AT&T wireless customers taken from a third-party cloud workspace (2024)
Contractor credentials without MFA accessed third-party cloud data warehouse; downloaded 109 million customer call and text records.
The failure pattern
Watch the pattern: Weak or phishable authentication on a privileged path
Safeguards that address it
CollectSEA's engineering analysis of what would have prevented or contained this failure.
- Require MFA for contractor and third-party accessThird-party accounts reaching data warehouses must use MFA and network allow-lists.
- Detect bulk exportAlert on and rate-limit large exports from analytics warehouses, and review who can read historical data.
Related standards
CollectSEA's mapping through this incident's failure pattern; not an official determination by the standards bodies.
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