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CNET
6 days ago
- Business
- CNET
This Massive AT&T Data Breach Settlement Could Pay $5K to Some: Find Out if You're Eligible
The 2024 hack of AT&T servers was one of the five biggest data breaches of the year. AT&T/CNET It's a tough time for AT&T -- especially with the recent conference call troubles for Donald Trump -- but their struggles could be your gain thanks to the $177 million settlement it's agreed to pay to customers that fell victim to data breaches in 2019 and 2024. On Friday, June 20, US District Judge Ada Brown granted preliminary approval to the terms of a proposed settlement from AT&T that would resolve two lawsuits related to the data breaches. The current settlement would see AT&T pay $177 million to customers adversely affected by at least one of the two data breaches. The settlement will prioritize larger payments to customers who suffered damages that are "fairly traceable" to the data leaks. It will also provide bigger payments to those affected by the larger of the two leaks, which began in 2019. While the company is working toward a settlement, it has continued to deny that it was "responsible for these criminal acts." For all the details we have about the settlement right now, keep reading, and for more info about other recent settlements, find out how to claim Apple's Siri privacy settlement and see if you're eligible for 23andMe's privacy breach settlement. What happened with these AT&T data breaches? AT&T confirmed the two data breaches last year, announcing an investigation into the first in March before confirming it in May and confirming the second in July. The first of the confirmed breaches began in 2019. The company revealed that about 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former account holders had their data exposed to hackers, including names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. The company began investigating the situation last year after it reported that customer data had appeared on the dark web. The second breach began in April of 2024, when a hacker broke into AT&T cloud storage provider Snowflake and accessed 2022 call and text records for almost all of the company's US customers, about 109 million in all. The company stressed that no names were attached to the stolen data. Two individuals were arrested in connection with the breach. Both of these incidents sparked a wave of class action lawsuits alleging corporate neglect on the part of AT&T in failing to sufficiently protect its customers. Who is eligible to file a claim for the AT&T data breach settlement? As of now, we know that the settlement will pay out to any current or former AT&T customer whose data was accessed in one of these data breaches, with higher payments reserved for those who can provide documented proof that they suffered damages directly resulting from their data being stolen. If you're eligible, you should receive a notice about it, either by email or a physical letter in the mail, sometime in the coming months. The company expects that the claims process will begin on Aug. 4, 2025. How much will the AT&T data breach payments be? You'll have to "reasonably" prove damages caused by these data breaches to be eligible for the highest and most prioritized payouts. For the 2019 breach, those claimants can receive up to $5,000. For the Snowflake breach in 2024, the max payout will be $2,500. It's not clear at this time how the company might be handling customers who've been affected by both breaches. AT&T will focus on making those payments first, and whatever's left of the $177 million settlement total will be disbursed to anyone whose data was accessed, even without proof of damages. Because these payouts depend on how many people get the higher amounts first, we can't say definitively how much they will be. When could I get paid from the AT&T data breach settlement? AT&T expects that payments will start to go out sometime in early 2026. Exact dates aren't available but the recent court order approving the settlement lists a notification schedule of Aug. 4, to Oct. 17, 2025. The deadline for submitting a claim is currently set at Nov. 18, 2025. The final approval of the settlement needs to be given at a Dec. 3, 2025, court hearing for payments to begin. Stay tuned to this piece in the coming months to get all the new details as they emerge. For more money help, check out CNET's daily tariff price impact tracker.
CNET
09-07-2025
- Business
- CNET
AT&T's $177 Million Data Breach Settlement Still Open: Who Qualifies and How Much You Can Get Paid
The 2024 hack of AT&T servers was one of the five biggest data breaches of the year. AT&T/CNET AT&T's attention might be stuck on Donald Trump's recent conference call troubles but it is also working on a settlement related two two major data breaches it suffered in 2019 and 2024. While the settlement isn't quite the size of Meta's $725 million privacy settlement, it likely will pay out claimants up to $2,500 or $5,000 each and you still have a few months left to opt in. On Friday, June 20, US District Judge Ada Brown granted preliminary approval to the terms of a proposed settlement from AT&T that would resolve two lawsuits related to the data breaches. The current settlement would see AT&T pay $177 million to customers adversely affected by at least one of the two data breaches. The settlement will prioritize larger payments to customers who suffered damages that are "fairly traceable" to the data leaks. It will also provide bigger payments to those affected by the larger of the two leaks, which began in 2019. While the company is working toward a settlement, it has continued to deny that it was "responsible for these criminal acts." For all the details we have about the settlement right now, keep reading, and for more info about other recent settlements, find out how to claim Apple's Siri privacy settlement and see if you're eligible for 23andMe's privacy breach settlement. What happened with these AT&T data breaches? AT&T confirmed the two data breaches last year, announcing an investigation into the first in March before confirming it in May and confirming the second in July. The first of the confirmed breaches began in 2019. The company revealed that about 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former account holders had their data exposed to hackers, including names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. The company began investigating the situation last year after it reported that customer data had appeared on the dark web. The second breach began in April of 2024, when a hacker broke into AT&T cloud storage provider Snowflake and accessed 2022 call and text records for almost all of the company's US customers, about 109 million in all. The company stressed that no names were attached to the stolen data. Two individuals were arrested in connection with the breach. Both of these incidents sparked a wave of class action lawsuits alleging corporate neglect on the part of AT&T in failing to sufficiently protect its customers. Who is eligible to file a claim for the AT&T data breach settlement? As of now, we know that the settlement will pay out to any current or former AT&T customer whose data was accessed in one of these data breaches, with higher payments reserved for those who can provide documented proof that they suffered damages directly resulting from their data being stolen. If you're eligible, you should receive a notice about it, either by email or a physical letter in the mail, sometime in the coming months. The company expects that the claims process will begin on Aug. 4, 2025. How much will the AT&T data breach payments be? You'll have to "reasonably" prove damages caused by these data breaches to be eligible for the highest and most prioritized payouts. For the 2019 breach, those claimants can receive up to $5,000. For the Snowflake breach in 2024, the max payout will be $2,500. It's not clear at this time how the company might be handling customers who've been affected by both breaches. AT&T will focus on making those payments first, and whatever's left of the $177 million settlement total will be disbursed to anyone whose data was accessed, even without proof of damages. Because these payouts depend on how many people get the higher amounts first, we can't say definitively how much they will be. When could I get paid from the AT&T data breach settlement? AT&T expects that payments will start to go out sometime in early 2026. Exact dates aren't available but the recent court order approving the settlement lists a notification schedule of Aug. 4, to Oct. 17, 2025. The deadline for submitting a claim is currently set at Nov. 18, 2025. The final approval of the settlement needs to be given at a Dec. 3, 2025, court hearing for payments to begin. Stay tuned to this piece in the coming months to get all the new details as they emerge. For more money help, check out CNET's daily tariff price impact tracker.
CNET
01-07-2025
- Business
- CNET
You Could Get Paid From AT&T's $177M Data Breach Settlement. Here's What to Know
More the 100 million people received a victim notice after the 2024 hack of AT&T servers. AT&T/CNET AT&T is about to pay a steep price for two data breaches that went down in 2019 and 2024, and if you were a customer, past or present, whose data was impacted, you can get a piece of that payment. On Friday, June 20, US District Judge Ada Brown granted preliminary approval to the terms of a proposed settlement from AT&T that would resolve two lawsuits related to the data breaches. The current settlement would see AT&T pay $177 million to customers adversely affected by at least one of the two data breaches. The settlement will prioritize larger payments to customers who suffered damages that are "fairly traceable" to the data leaks. It will also provide bigger payments to those impacted by the larger of the two leaks, which began in 2019. While the company is working toward a settlement, it has continued to deny that it was "responsible for these criminal acts." For all the details we have about the settlement right now, keep reading, and for more info about other recent settlements, find out how to claim Apple's Siri privacy settlement and see if you're eligible for 23andMe's privacy breach settlement. What happened with these AT&T data breaches? AT&T confirmed the two data breaches last year, announcing an investigation into the first in March before confirming it in May and confirming the second in July. The first of the confirmed breaches began in 2019. The company revealed that about 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former account holders had their data exposed to hackers, including names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. The company first began investigating the situation last year after it reported that customer data had appeared on the dark web. The second breach began in April of 2024, when a hacker broke into AT&T cloud storage provider Snowflake and accessed 2022 call and text records for almost all of the company's US customers, about 109 million in all. The company stressed that no names were attached to the stolen data. Two individuals were arrested in connection with the breach. Both of these incidents sparked a wave of class action lawsuits alleging corporate neglect on the part of AT&T in failing to sufficiently protect its customers. How will I know if I'm eligible for the AT&T data breach settlement? As of now, we know that the settlement will pay out to any current or former AT&T customer whose data was accessed in one of these data breaches, with higher payments reserved for those who can provide documented proof that they suffered damages directly resulting from their data being stolen. If you're eligible, you should receive a notice about it, either by email or a physical letter in the mail, sometime in the coming months. The company expects that the claims process will begin on Aug. 4, 2025. How much will the AT&T data breach payments be? You'll have to "reasonably" prove damages caused by these data breaches to be eligible for the highest and most prioritized payouts. For the 2019 breach, those claimants can receive up to $5,000. For the Snowflake breach in 2024, the max payout will be $2,500. It's not clear at this time how the company might be handling customers who've been affected by both breaches. AT&T will focus on making those payments first, and whatever's left of the $177 million settlement total will be disbursed to anyone whose data was accessed, even without proof of damages. Because these payouts depend on how many people get the higher amounts first, we can't say definitively how much they will be. When could I get paid from the AT&T data breach settlement? AT&T expects that payments will start to go out sometime in early 2026. Exact dates aren't available right now. The recent court order approving the settlement lists a notification schedule of Aug. 4 to Oct. 17, 2025. The deadline for submitting a claim is currently set at Nov. 18, 2025. The final approval of the settlement needs to be given at a Dec. 3, 2025, court hearing in order for payments to begin. Stay tuned to this piece in the coming months to get all the new details as they emerge. For more money help, check out CNET's daily tariff price impact tracker.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Judge approves AT&T's $177M data breach settlement
This story was originally published on CFO Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CFO Dive newsletter. A federal district court judge has given preliminary approval to a proposed $177 million settlement between AT&T and plaintiffs who sued the company last year over a pair of massive data security breaches impacting millions of customers. The breaches resulted in a number of lawsuits that were eventually combined into a single class action complaint before Judge Ada Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The judge has scheduled a Dec. 3 hearing to consider the settlement for final approval, according to a Friday order. 'While we deny the allegations in these lawsuits that we were responsible for these criminal acts, we have agreed to this settlement to avoid the expense and uncertainty of protracted litigation,' an AT&T spokesperson said in an email. The consolidated class action highlights a growing concern for business leaders: the steady escalation of cybersecurity threats and data breach costs. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 859,532 complaints of suspected internet crime in 2024, with reported losses exceeding $16 billion, a 33% increase over the prior year, according to a report released in April. 'Cybersecurity is not just an IT problem or a crisis scenario from a playbook, but a persistent and growing business concern with real financial implications, including the potential costs of incident response, legal liabilities, reputational damage, and loss of revenue from lack of consumer trust,' Ernst & Young cybersecurity consultants Tunde Lawson and Jaime Kipnes wrote in an April article on the topic. Mitigating cyber risks and incorporating them into the organization's long-term financial strategy is a mission shared by multiple people in the C-suite, including the CFO, who is 'uniquely positioned to quantify these risks and estimate the cost of an incident,' the authors said. Working in concert with the chief information security officer, the CFO can 'better understand the probability and exposure to risk, set metrics on spending and ROI, and communicate recommendations for prioritizing cybersecurity spending,' they wrote. AT&T is among companies that reported some of the largest cyberattacks last year, according to a tally by the Cyber Management Alliance, a U.K.-based consulting firm. The AT&T proposed settlement includes $149 million to resolve a set of class action claims related to a breach the company disclosed in March 2024. The remaining $28 million is for class members impacted by a separate AT&T data breach disclosed in July 2024. 'Plaintiffs and Class Members were foreseeable victims of AT&T's inadequate data security practices, and it was also foreseeable that AT&T's failure to provide timely and adequate notice of the Data Breaches would result in injury to Plaintiffs and Class Members as described in this Complaint,' according to a consolidated class action complaint filed last month. In its public notice on the first breach, the telecommunications giant said it determined that 'data-specific fields' from the company were contained in a data set released on the 'dark web.' As many as 73 million current and former customers were impacted by the incident, the notice said. The compromised data varied by customer and account, but may have included full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth, and AT&T account numbers and passcodes, according to a set of frequently asked questions published by the company at the time. The incident triggered a flurry of class action lawsuits. In June 2024, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation issued an order that consolidated the cases in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The company then faced a new wave of lawsuits after it disclosed the second data breach. That incident compromised six months' worth of call and text message records of 'nearly every' AT&T cellular network customer in 2022, according to a securities filing. Sign in to access your portfolio
Time of India
21-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AT&T's $177 million data breach settlement wins US court approval
A U.S. judge granted preliminary approval on Friday to a $177 million settlement that resolves lawsuits against AT&T over breaches in 2024 that exposed personal information belonging to tens of millions of the telecom giant's customers. U.S. District Judge Ada Brown in Dallas said in a ruling that the class-action settlement was fair and reasonable. The deal resolves claims over data breaches that AT&T announced in May and July last year. Depending on which breach is involved, AT&T has agreed to pay up to $2,500 or $5,000 to customers who suffered losses that are "fairly traceable" to the incidents. After payments are made for direct losses, the remaining funds will be distributed to customers whose personal information was accessed. AT&T did not immediately comment. One of the incidents resulted in the illegal downloading of about 109 million customer accounts at the U.S. wireless company. AT&T disclosed that its call logs were copied from its workspace on a Snowflake cloud platform covering about six months of customer call and text data from 2022 from nearly all its customers. In March 2024, AT&T said it was investigating a data set released on the "dark web" and said its preliminary analysis showed it affected approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former account holders. The company said the data set appeared to be from 2019 or earlier. The Federal Communications Commission is also investigating. In September, AT&T agreed to pay $13 million to resolve an FCC investigation over a data breach of a cloud vendor in January 2023 that impacted 8.9 million AT&T wireless customers. The FCC said the data exposed in 2023 covered customers from 2015 through 2017 that should have been deleted in 2017 or 2018.
