A United States judge granted preliminary approval on Friday to a significant one hundred seventy-seven-million-dollar settlement.
This major legal settlement resolves class-action lawsuits filed against the telecommunications company AT&T over its data breaches. The security breaches in 2024 exposed the sensitive personal information belonging to tens of millions of customers. A U.S. District Judge in Dallas said in her ruling that the class-action settlement was fair and reasonable.
The new deal resolves claims over the data breaches that the company AT&T announced in May and July. AT&T has agreed to pay up to five thousand dollars to customers who suffered direct financial losses. After payments are made for these direct losses, the remaining funds will then be distributed to other customers.
AT&T stated that it denied all of the allegations that it was “responsible for these criminal acts.”
One of the incidents resulted in the illegal downloading of about 109 million different customer accounts. AT&T disclosed that its call logs were copied from its workspace on a popular Snowflake cloud platform. This data covered about six months of customer call and text data from the calendar year of 2022. In March 2024, AT&T said it was investigating a data set that was released on the dark web.
The Federal Communications Commission, which is also known as the FCC, is currently investigating the data breaches. In September, AT&T separately agreed to pay thirteen million dollars to resolve a different FCC investigation. That specific data breach of a cloud vendor in January 2023 impacted approximately 8.9 million AT&T wireless customers. The FCC said the data exposed in that 2023 breach should have been deleted several years earlier.
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