Senators press AT&T, Snowflake for answers on wide-ranging data breach
A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators on Tuesday pressed the leaders of AT&T and data storage company Snowflake for more information about the scope of a recent breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal records on “nearly all” of the phone giant’s customers.
“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,” Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leaders of the Judiciary Committee’s privacy subpanel, wrote Tuesday in a letter to AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey.
The duo also sent a missive to Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy that said the theft of AT&T subscriber information “appears to be connected with an ongoing series of breaches” of the company’s clients, including Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, and Santander Bank.
“Disturbingly, the Ticketmaster and AT&T breaches appears [sic] to have been easily preventable,” they wrote to Ramaswamy.
Blumenthal and Hawley gave the corporate leaders until July 29 to answer a series of questions about the breach, which stretched over a six-month period, including: how the hackers behind the AT&T break-in gained access to Snowflake services; what kind of probe, if any, Snowflake has conducted into the incident; and what notifications either company sent to clients whose accounts were hacked.
Martin Matishak
is the senior cybersecurity reporter for The Record. Prior to joining Recorded Future News in 2021, he spent more than five years at Politico, where he covered digital and national security developments across Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. He previously was a reporter at The Hill, National Journal Group and Inside Washington Publishers.