Login
A new breach involving data from nine million AT&T customers is a fresh reminder that your mobile provider likely collects and shares a great deal of information about where you go and what you do with your mobile device — unless and until you affirmatively opt out of this data collection. Here’s a primer on why you might want to do that, and how.
Image: Shutterstock
Telecommunications giant AT&T disclosed this month that a breach at a marketing vendor exposed certain account information for nine million customers. AT&T said the data exposed did not include sensitive information, such as credit card or Social Security numbers, or account passwords, but was limited to “Customer Proprietary Network Information” (CPNI), such as the number of lines on an account.
Certain questions may be coming to mind right now, like “What the heck is CPNI?” And, ‘If it’s so ‘customer proprietary,’ why is AT&T sharing it with marketers?” Also maybe, “What can I do about it?” Read on for answers to all three questions.
AT&T’s disclosure said the information exposed included customer first name, wireless account number, wireless phone number and email address. In addition, a small percentage of customer records also exposed the rate plan name, past due amounts, monthly payment amounts and minutes used.
CPNI refers to customer-specific “metadata” about the account and account usage, and may include:
-Called phone numbers
-Time of calls
-Length of calls
-Cost and billing of calls
-Service features
-Premium services, such as directory call assistance
According to a succinct CPNI explainer at TechTarget, CPNI is private and protected information that cannot be used for advertising or marketing directly.
“An individual’s CPNI can be shared with other telecommunications providers for network operating reasons,” wrote TechTarget’s Gavin Wright. “So, when the individual first signs up for phone service, this information is automatically shared by the phone provider to partner companies.”
Is your mobile Internet usage covered by CPNI laws? That’s less clear, as the CPNI rules were established before mobile phones and wireless Internet access were common. TechTarget’s CPNI primer explains:
“Under current U.S. law, cellphone use is only protected as CPNI when it is being used as a telephone. During this time, the company is acting as a telecommunications provider requiring CPNI rules. Internet use, websites visited, search history or apps used are not protected CPNI because the company is acting as an information services provider not subject to these laws.”
Hence, the carriers can share and sell this data because they’re not explicitly prohibited from doing so. All three major carriers say they take steps to anonymize the customer data they share, but researchers have shown it is not terribly difficult to de-anonymize supposedly anonymous web-browsing data.
“Your phone, and consequently your mobile provider, know a lot about you,” wrote Jack Morse for Mashable. “The places you go, apps you use, and the websites you visit potentially reveal all kinds of private information — e.g. religious beliefs, health conditions, travel plans, income level, and specific tastes in pornography. This should bother you.”
Happily, all of the U.S. carriers are required to offer customers ways to opt out of having data about how they use their devices shared with marketers. Here’s a look at some of the carrier-specific practices and opt-out options.
AT&T’s policy says it shares device or “ad ID”, combined with demographics including age range, gender, and ZIP code information with third parties which explicitly include advertisers, programmers, and networks, social media networks, analytics firms, ad networks and other similar companies that are involved in creating and delivering advertisements.
AT&T said the data exposed on 9 million customers was several years old, and mostly related to device upgrade eligibility. This may sound like the data went to just one of its partners who experienced a breach, but in all likelihood it also went to hundreds of AT&T’s partners.
AT&T’s CPNI opt-out page says it shares CPNI data with several of its affiliates, including WarnerMedia, DirecTV and Cricket Wireless. Until recently, AT&T also shared CPNI data with Xandr, whose privacy policy in turn explains that it shares data with hundreds of other advertising firms. Microsoft bought Xandr from AT&T last year.
According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), T-Mobile seems to be the only company out of the big three to extend to all customers the rights conferred by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
EPIC says T-Mobile customer data sold to third parties uses another unique identifier called mobile advertising IDs or “MAIDs.” T-Mobile claims that MAIDs don’t directly identify consumers, but under the CCPA MAIDs are considered “personal information” that can be connected to IP addresses, mobile apps installed or used with the device, any video or content viewing information, and device activity and attributes.
T-Mobile customers can opt out by logging into their account and navigating to the profile page, then to “Privacy and Notifications.” From there, toggle off the options for “Use my data for analytics and reporting” and “Use my data to make ads more relevant to me.”
Verizon’s privacy policy says it does not sell information that personally identities customers (e.g., name, telephone number or email address), but it does allow third-party advertising companies to collect information about activity on Verizon websites and in Verizon apps, through MAIDs, pixels, web beacons and social network plugins.
According to Wired.com’s tutorial, Verizon users can opt out by logging into their Verizon account through a web browser or the My Verizon mobile app. From there, select the Account tab, then click Account Settings and Privacy Settings on the web. For the mobile app, click the gear icon in the upper right corner and then Manage Privacy Settings.
On the privacy preferences page, web users can choose “Don’t use” under the Custom Experience section. On the My Verizon app, toggle any green sliders to the left.
EPIC notes that all three major carriers say resetting the consumer’s device ID and/or clearing cookies in the browser will similarly reset any opt-out preferences (i.e., the customer will need to opt out again), and that blocking cookies by default may also block the opt-out cookie from being set.
T-Mobile says its opt out is device-specific and/or browser-specific. “In most cases, your opt-out choice will apply only to the specific device or browser on which it was made. You may need to separately opt out from your other devices and browsers.”
Both AT&T and Verizon offer opt-in programs that gather and share far more information, including device location, the phone numbers you call, and which sites you visit using your mobile and/or home Internet connection. AT&T calls this their Enhanced Relevant Advertising Program; Verizon’s is called Custom Experience Plus.
In 2021, multiple media outlets reported that some Verizon customers were being automatically enrolled in Custom Experience Plus — even after those customers had already opted out of the same program under its previous name — “Verizon Selects.”
If none of the above opt out options work for you, at a minimum you should be able to opt out of CPNI sharing by calling your carrier, or by visiting one of their stores.
Why should you opt out of sharing CPNI data? For starters, some of the nation’s largest wireless carriers don’t have a great track record in terms of protecting the sensitive information that you give them solely for the purposes of becoming a customer — let alone the information they collect about your use of their services after that point.
In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that someone stole data on 37 million customer accounts, including customer name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and plan details. In August 2021, T-Mobile acknowledged that hackers made off with the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license/ID information on more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company.
Last summer, a cybercriminal began selling the names, email addresses, phone numbers, SSNs and dates of birth on 23 million Americans. An exhaustive analysis of the data strongly suggested it all belonged to customers of one AT&T company or another. AT&T stopped short of saying the data wasn’t theirs, but said the records did not appear to have come from its systems and may be tied to a previous data incident at another company.
However frequently the carriers may alert consumers about CPNI breaches, it’s probably nowhere near often enough. Currently, the carriers are required to report a consumer CPNI breach only in cases “when a person, without authorization or exceeding authorization, has intentionally gained access to, used or disclosed CPNI.”
But that definition of breach was crafted eons ago, back when the primary way CPNI was exposed was through “pretexting,” such when the phone company’s employees are tricked into giving away protected customer data.
In January, regulators at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed amending the definition of “breach” to include things like inadvertent disclosure — such as when companies expose CPNI data on a poorly-secured server in the cloud. The FCC is accepting public comments on the matter until March 24, 2023.
While it’s true that the leak of CPNI data does not involve sensitive information like Social Security or credit card numbers, one thing AT&T’s breach notice doesn’t mention is that CPNI data — such as balances and payments made — can be abused by fraudsters to make scam emails and text messages more believable when they’re trying to impersonate AT&T and phish AT&T customers.
The other problem with letting companies share or sell your CPNI data is that the wireless carriers can change their privacy policies at any time, and you are assumed to be okay with those changes as long as you keep using their services.
For example, location data from your wireless device is most definitely CPNI, and yet until very recently all of the major carriers sold their customers’ real-time location data to third party data brokers without customer consent.
What was their punishment? In 2020, the FCC proposed fines totaling $208 million against all of the major carriers for selling their customers’ real-time location data. If that sounds like a lot of money, consider that all of the major wireless providers reported tens of billions of dollars in revenue last year (e.g., Verizon’s consumer revenue alone was more than $100 billion last year).
If the United States had federal privacy laws that were at all consumer-friendly and relevant to today’s digital economy, this kind of data collection and sharing would always be opt-in by default. In such a world, the enormously profitable wireless industry would likely be forced to offer clear financial incentives to customers who choose to share this information.
But until that day arrives, understand that the carriers can change their data collection and sharing policies when it suits them. And regardless of whether you actually read any notices about changes to their privacy policies, you will have agreed to those changes as long as you continue using their service.
Related tags
Authorities in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. last week said they dismantled the “RSOCKS” botnet, a collection of millions of hacked devices that were sold as “proxies” to cybercriminals looking for ways to route their malicious traffic through someone else’s computer. While the coordinated action did not name the Russian hackers allegedly behind RSOCKS, KrebsOnSecurity has identified its owner as a 35-year-old Russian man living abroad who also runs the world’s top spam forum.
The RUSdot mailer, the email spamming tool made and sold by the administrator of RSOCKS.
According to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice, RSOCKS offered clients access to IP addresses assigned to devices that had been hacked:
“A cybercriminal who wanted to utilize the RSOCKS platform could use a web browser to navigate to a web-based ‘storefront’ (i.e., a public web site that allows users to purchase access to the botnet), which allowed the customer to pay to rent access to a pool of proxies for a specified daily, weekly, or monthly time period. The cost for access to a pool of RSOCKS proxies ranged from $30 per day for access to 2,000 proxies to $200 per day for access to 90,000 proxies.”
The DOJ’s statement doesn’t mention that RSOCKS has been in operation since 2014, when access to the web store for the botnet was first advertised on multiple Russian-language cybercrime forums.
The user “RSOCKS” on the Russian crime forum Verified changed his name to RSOCKS from a previous handle: “Stanx,” whose very first sales thread on Verified in 2016 quickly ran afoul of the forum’s rules and prompted a public chastisement by the forum’s administrator.
Verified was hacked twice in the past few years, and each time the private messages of all users on the forum were leaked. Those messages show that after being warned of his forum infraction, Stanx sent a private message to the Verified administrator detailing his cybercriminal bona fides.
“I am the owner of the RUSdot forum (former Spamdot),” Stanx wrote in Sept. 2016. “In spam topics, people know me as a reliable person.”
A Google-translated version of the Rusdot spam forum.
RUSdot is the successor forum to Spamdot, a far more secretive and restricted forum where most of the world’s top spammers, virus writers and cybercriminals collaborated for years before the community’s implosion in 2010. Even today, the RUSdot Mailer is advertised for sale at the top of the RUSdot community forum.
Stanx said he was a longtime member of several major forums, including the Russian hacker forum Antichat (since 2005), and the Russian crime forum Exploit (since April 2013). In an early post to Antichat in January 2005, Stanx disclosed that he is from Omsk, a large city in the Siberian region of Russia.
According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the user Stanx indeed registered on Exploit in 2013, using the email address stanx@rusdot.com, and the ICQ number 399611. A search in Google for that ICQ number turns up a cached version of a Vkontakte profile for a Denis “Neo” Kloster, from Omsk, Russia.
Cybersecurity firm Constella Intelligence shows that in 2017, someone using the email address istanx@gmail.com registered at the Russian freelancer job site fl.ru with the profile name of “Denis Kloster” and the Omsk phone number of 79136334444. Another record indexed by Constella suggests Denis’s real surname may in fact be “Emilyantsev” [Емельянцев].
That phone number is tied to the WHOIS registration records for multiple domain names over the years, including proxy[.]info, allproxy[.]info, kloster.pro and deniskloster.com.
A copy of the passport for Denis Kloster, as posted to his Vkontakte page in 2019. It shows that in Oct. 2019, he obtained a visa from the American Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.
The “about me” section of DenisKloster.com says the 35-year-old was born in Omsk, that he got his first computer at age 12, and graduated from high school at 16. Kloster says he’s worked in many large companies in Omsk as a system administrator, web developer and photographer.
According to Kloster’s blog, his first real job was running an “online advertising” firm he founded called Internet Advertising Omsk (“riOmsk“), and that he even lived in New York City for a while.
“Something new was required and I decided to leave Omsk and try to live in the States,” Kloster wrote in 2013. “I opened an American visa for myself, it was not difficult to get. And so I moved to live in New York, the largest city in the world, in a country where all wishes come true. But even this was not enough for me, and since then I began to travel the world.”
The current version of the About Me page on Kloster’s site says he closed his advertising business in 2013 to travel the world and focus on his new company: One that provides security and anonymity services to customers around the world. Kloster’s vanity website and LinkedIn page both list him as CEO of a company called “SL MobPartners.”
In 2016, Deniskloster.com featured a post celebrating three years in operation. The anniversary post said Kloster’s anonymity business had grown to nearly two dozen employees, most of whom were included in a group photo posted to that article (and some of whom Kloster thanked by their first names and last initials).
The employees who kept things running for RSOCKS, circa 2016.
“Thanks to you, we are now developing in the field of information security and anonymity!,” the post enthuses. “We make products that are used by thousands of people around the world, and this is very cool! And this is just the beginning!!! We don’t just work together and we’re not just friends, we’re Family.”
Mr. Kloster did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
It’s not clear if the coordinated takedown targeting the RSOCKS botnet will be permanent, as the botnet’s owners could simply rebuild — and possibly rebrand — their crime machine. Based on the RSOCKS owner’s posts, that is exactly what they intend to do.
“RSocks ceases to exist,” wrote the Rsocks account on the BlackHatWorld forum on June 17. “But don’t worry. All the active plans and fund balances will be transferred to another service. Stay tuned. We will inform you about its name and all the details later.”
Rsocks told the BlackHatWorld community they would be back soon under a new name.
Malware-based proxy services like RSOCKS have struggled to remain competitive in a cybercrime market with increasingly sophisticated proxy services that offer many additional features. The demise of RSOCKS follows closely on the heels of VIP72[.]com, a competing proxy botnet service that operated for a decade before its owners pulled the plug on the service last year.
FreshRSS