AT&T to Pay $13 Million Settlement Over Vendor Data Breach

AT&T has agreed to pay $13 million to settle a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation into a vendor-related data breach that compromised the information of millions of the company’s customers. The FCC said in a Sept. 17 announcement that the $13 million settlement resolves an Enforcement Bureau investigation into AT&T’s supply chain integrity and whether the company failed to protect its customers’ information in connection with a data breach of one of its vendors, who should not have been holding AT&T customer information. “Today’s announcement should send a strong message that the Enforcement Bureau will not hesitate to take action against service providers that choose to put their customers’ data in the cloud, share that data with their vendors, and then fail to be responsible custodians of that data,” Loyaan Egal, chief of the Enforcement Bureau and chair of the FCC’s privacy and data protection task force, said in a statement....