Free Republic

Hackers have leaked what they claim is AT&T’s database which was reportedly stolen by the ShinyHunters group in April 2024 after they exploited major security flaws in the Snowflake cloud data platform. But is this really the Snowflake-linked data? We took a closer look. As seen by the Hackread.com research team, the data was first posted on a well-known Russian cybercrime forum on May 15, 2025. It was re-uploaded on the same forum on June 3, 2025, after which it began circulating among other hackers and forums. After analyzing the leaked data, we found it contains a detailed set of...

The People’s Republic of California is at it again; through unelected state officials, California is severing ties to ham radio repeater owners throughout the state, jeopardizing the lives of millions of Californians who depend on these repeaters to operate during emergencies. Last month, repeater operators were sent emails telling them the State would no longer allow them to operate repeaters on public land without paying substantial rental fees. In the letter sent by CAL FIRE, the state claims Ham operators no longer provide a benefit to the state or public safety. They claimed that “constantly changing technological advances” has made...

When first responder communications networks failed after 9/11, the government decided to build a nationwide wireless emergency communications network that would actually work. It took a decade of general histrionics and dysfunction by Congress, but in 2012 the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act formally created the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet). FirstNet is an entirely new federal agency tasked with coordinating the build of a 700 MHz LTE-based coast-to-coast emergency broadband network. But since its creation the effort (tell us if you've heard this one before) has been plagued with dysfunction, allegations of incumbent carrier cronyism, and...

A new broadband law is going into effect this week in New York state requiring internet provider to offer low-income residents access to monthly broadband rates of $15 for 25Mbps or $20 for 200Mbps. As a response, AT&T has decided that it no longer plans to offer its 5G home internet in the Empire State and will begin notifying users about the decision on Wednesday. "While we are committed to providing reliable and affordable internet service to customers across the country, New York's broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand...

U.S. officials have added a ninth telecommunications company to the list of entities compromised by a sweeping Chinese-linked cyberespionage operation known as Salt Typhoon, a top White House official said Friday. Anne Neuberger, the U.S. deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, told reporters on a call that the unnamed telecom was added to the list after the U.S. government shared guidance on how to detect and defend against the operation. Officials have previously alleged that the attackers targeted Verizon, AT&T, Lumen and others. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Dec. 18 urged senior government and political...

Multiple U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, have been breached by a Chinese hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon, the Wall Street Journal reports. The purpose of the attack appears to be intelligence collection as the hackers might have had access to systems used by the U.S. federal government for court-authorized network wiretapping requests. It is unclear when the intrusion occurred, but WSJ cites people familiar with the matter, saying that "for months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data." Salt Typhoon is...

(WRIC) — AT&T customers in parts of the country are reporting an outage that’s left them without service or their iPhone devices stuck in SOS mode. Reports of an outage peaked just before 6 p.m. CST on Downdetector, with more than 5,700 users complaining of a service disruption. By 8:35 p.m., the reports fell to just over 3,400. According to USA Today, a company spokesperson said AT&T is working to fix a “software issue that may be disrupting the ability of some of our customers to connect to our wireless network.” The spokesperson told the outlet that the outage seems...

Weeks after their contract expired, thousands of workers are going on strike in hopes of better pay and benefits. Nearly 17,000 AT&T workers are on strike as their union, the Communication Workers of America, accused the company of "unfair labor practices." The 17,000 workers are in the AT&T Southeast region and serve the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Striking employees include technicians, customer service representatives, and others who install, maintain, and support AT&T’s residential and business wireline telecommunications network, the union said. The Communication Workers of America filed a grievance with...

AT&T has announced that the company believes a hacker stole records of calls and texts from nearly all of AT&T's wireless customers, according to a financial filing from the company. "The data does not contain the content of calls or texts, personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information," AT&T said in their statement released early Friday morning. "These records identify the telephone numbers with which an AT&T or MVNO wireless number interacted during these periods, including telephone numbers of AT&T wireline customers and customers of other carriers, counts of those interactions, and...

AT&T suffered a massive data breach that saw data from 'nearly all' of its customers' accounts illegally downloaded, the company has confirmed. The compromised data included records of calls and texts of wireless subscribers and landline customers over a five month period in 2022. AT&T listed it had 110 million wireless customers that year, which would make this hack one of the biggest breaches of private communications data in recent history. Although the exposed data did not include customer names, there are 'publicly available online tools' capable of connecting numbers with people's identities, the company said. AT&T admitted it had...

Tens of thousands of AT&T customers were left without service for hours on Thursday for their home phone, internet and mobile phone services, according to Downdetector. The outages started popping up just before 3:30 a.m. ET, according to a graph shown on the website that tracks outages. Just before 2 p.m. ET, the number of reports had declined drastically to nearly 4,900 after spiking at more than 73,000 just after 9 a.m. ET. Most users still impacted, 51%, say they are having issues with mobile phone service. Forty percent of customers currently reporting being affected say they have no signal...

If you are waking up Thursday morning and having trouble with your smartphone you are not alone. There have been millions of reports made coast to coast about a major problem with the AT&T wireless network. According to the Flagler County Sheriff's Office in Florida, subscribers are unable to call or text 911.

Two sources briefed on the situation told ABC News that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies, are now urgently investigating to determine whether the AT&T outages are the result of a cyber attack or a hack, or simply some sort of technical malfunction. More than 73,000 AT&T customers reported outages on digital-service tracking site DownDetector. That's not a comprehensive number: It tracks only self-reported outages. Although outage reports fell a bit in the 5 am ET hour, they bounced back in the 7 am ET hour and continue to surge. Several local governments said AT&T's...

A major cellphone outage affected users across the US early Thursday — even stopping some police departments from being able to receive 911 calls.AT&T seemed to have experienced the largest number of issues, with nearly 32,000 reports at around 4:30 a.m., according to data from DownDetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.More than 800 service outages were also reported on T-Mobile and Verizon, although a spokesperson for the latter put it down to users reporting problems trying to call people with other services.Others reported issues on smaller carriers including Boost Mobile,...

A proposal by phone and internet service provider, AT&T, to end landline service for most Californians is drawing backlash.

Millions of Americans who use AT&T’s phone network are having their phone calls monitored by a surveillance program called Data Analytical Services (DAS), which has had coordination with federal and local law enforcement agencies. According to a document obtained by WIRED, DAS has been secretly collecting and analyzing over one trillion domestic phone records within the U.S. each year. The program used to be called Hemisphere and is run by AT&T in coordination with different agencies, according to Fox News. The program uses a technique known as chain analysis. This goes after those who have been in direct contact with...

San Francisco-based companies leaving The Golden City because of drop in revenue ... San Francisco, California-based tech CEO Mark Benioff says the city will never go back to the way it was ... ... Golden City is struggling to keep businesses intact, leaving many buildings vacant.. office vacancy rates in San Francisco were 24.8% in the first quarter, more than five times higher than pre-pandemic levels and well above the average rate of 18.5% for the nation’s top cities, ... For San Francisco, the three-year exile resulted in empty storefronts with large "going out of business" signs hanging from windows....

“What is the line of communications between Hunter Biden and his business partners and Joe Biden when he’s Vice President of the United States?” Schweizer said. “It’s not the government phone. It’s not Joe Biden’s personal phone. We know from the laptop that Hunter Biden’s business paid for a private phone line that Joe Biden used while he was Vice President. Schweizer continued, “It was from AT&T. It was $300 a month. It was a global phone where you could access somebody anywhere around the world.” As Banks Fail and Americans Scramble to Protect Retirement Accounts With Physical Gold and...

AT&T spokeswoman launches into leftist social justice rant (Credit: TikTok/Twitter) In 2019, Gillette decided that it needed to pile-drive its customer base with a “men are terrible” message. They ran an ad campaign with the ostensible message that “toxic masculinity” was bad, and they did it by nuking every man alive or dead. Toxic anything is bad. I don’t need a razor company lecturing during the Super Bowl, while it places me in the same company of jerks just because some men are jerks. Gillette wasn’t advertising a product, rather, it was lecturing its customer base. The “message” didn’t...

It appears that DirecTV dubiously dropping Newsmax and One America News within months of each other may be connected to the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against the two news outlets. AT&T, which holds the majority ownership stake in DirecTV (70 percent), is overseen by its liberal Board Chairman William Kennard, who’s been accused of directly interfering in the decision by DirecTV to drop OAN April 2022. This development happened just under a year after it was reported that Dominion Voting Systems, the voting tech company that was the subject of controversy during the 2020 election, had launched billion-dollar lawsuits...