According to chron.com, Iranian linked hackers have claimed responsibility for a widespread service outage at AT&T in Texas.

The group, calling itself “APT Iran”, created its Telegram channel on September 9 of this year. Their first attack took place on August 3 against a hosting site in Turkey called “Yesibeyaz Hosting”, where they executed a disk wiper attack that completely knocked out the servers. APT Iran has also threatened to attack water energy, telecommunications infrastructure in the United States.

AT&T, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the U.S., confirmed a major outage on September 7 affecting Houston, Spring, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin – but denied the hackers’ claims. The company stated that there was no evidence that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. It may be of interest to note that AT&T had previously reported a security incident in March 2024, where customer data was illegally downloaded from a third-party cloud platform. Cybernews reported that they examined a sample of this leak, and stated that it was difficult to confirm the overall authenticity as the initial sample only included an single individuals’ data.

AT&T claimed it has reviewed the disrupted services, and that the network remains under observation and operations have returned to normal. Despite the lack of official confirmation, this potential cyberattack has raised serious questions regarding data privacy and financial fraud.