Last week, T-Mobile sparked moans after confirming a massive customer data hack – its fourth such hack in four years. For a short time, it emerged that something similar had happened to its domestic competitor, AT&T: An article on a hacker forum claimed to have customer data of 70 million people, sold for $ 200,000. But contrary to T-Mobile’s response, AT&T says its investigation of the sample data indicates that it is not coming from the company’s servers.

MarketWatch quotes an email from AT&T to members of the media: “Based on our investigation today, information that appeared in an Internet chat room does not appear to be coming from our systems.” The implicit conclusion is that either the data was collected from third party sources with access to AT&T customer information (which is certainly possible), or the poster on the forum simply made up the data and is looking for a quick paycheck.

It is also very possible: we are talking about criminals who illegally steal data to sell it for identity theft. It’s not hard to believe that these people would be on top of just fighting their way to a bargain. The time would have come to do so, shortly after a similar company confirmed a successful new penetration of its systems.

Along the same lines, it’s also worth pointing out that a large telecom company has enough motivation to be, shall we say, “downplay” the news that its data security is not up to par. . The only thing we can say for sure is that attacks on customer data, the marketplace and the culture around them aren’t going away anytime soon.