Hackers didn't do anything, at&t failed in one of their few roles, security. It's your fault for being so pathetically shit. These companies seriously need major punishments or being jailed for life. I'm beyond sick of them all and they no fucks given bribe everything mentality.
Hackers in this case likely means someone who can read a url and increment a number and is curious. Which ought to be everyone over the age of about 7.
Companies should be forced to pay thousands of dollars to each customer that gets their data stolen on top of paying for any damages caused by the use of the stolen data. That would put them out of business with a breach this large.
They all get cybersecurity insurance to limit/eliminate that risk and pass it down to someone else. Yeah, we're at a point where companies have accepted it'll happen and pay for fucking cybersecurity insurance to protect their capital instead of spending that money on actual security.
Increasing the liability just means the premiums will be passed down to the users, and insurance companies will be rolling in cash. Not like the users would get the settlements anyway.
And of course there's the whole problem of disposable LLCs, so even a corporate death penalty would do shit, because our society doesn't give a shit about people, only capital.
Which means AT&T customers can expect spam calls/texts to get much worse in the coming weeks. This breach is basically a gigantic list of known good phone numbers, and there are free tools available to link names/emails to phone numbers.