I'd appreciate any help that y'all can give. Like many, I'm part of the AT&T breach with my SS# and old email addresses exposed. One of the email addresses used the old AT&T domain "sbcglobal.net" and the other used a domain that I owned at one time and have since shut down.

My concern is that the bad guys could resurrect either or both of those old email addresses and, in combination with my SS#, do all sorts of bad things. My thinking is to attempt to restore one or both of those addresses so that any emails sent to them come to me, rather than a bad guy.

Is that possible to do, and, if so, done for free?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Jabin said:

---

I'd appreciate any help that y'all can give. Like many, I'm part of the AT&T breach with my SS# and old email addresses exposed. One of the email addresses used the old AT&T domain "sbcglobal.net" and the other used a domain that I owned at one time and have since shut down.

My concern is that the bad guys could resurrect either or both of those old email addresses and, in combination with my SS#, do all sorts of bad things. My thinking is to attempt to restore one or both of those addresses so that any emails sent to them come to me, rather than a bad guy.

Is that possible to do, and, if so, done for free?

Thanks in advance for any help.

---

I had an sbcglobal.net address, and about a year ago I had to reset the password. It was impossible online and after at least five phone calls to their support. I bet neither you or a bad actor would be able to do it if you tried.

I still use my sbcglobal.net email. It's through Yahoo. I remember it being a pain to get into for recovery because it was tied to my old AT&T account.

Don't give up, do whatever you can to get it recovered and set a good password and two factor with your password manager.

Once you gain control of it, the forwarding process to Gmail is really easy.

Quote:

---

set a good password and two factor

---

I've managed to restore my sbcglobal.net email and gain access to it, but I don't see how to set up 2 Factor Authentication on the AT&T site.

Jabin said:

---

Quote:

---

set a good password and two factor

---

I've managed to restore my sbcglobal.net email and gain access to it, but I don't see how to set up 2 Factor Authentication on the AT&T site.

---

As far as I know AT&T doesn't have 2FA as part of their account management at all. Only a PIN (which is part of the compromised data) and security questions. I would advise changing both. For security questions your best advice is to choose any question but make up complete garbage answer for it and store that in a password manager. Don't truthfully answer it because social data mining is a real thing.

With respect to your other email account you'd have to reregister that domain, setup an email account for it again with the same address and then use it to make any other changes before sunsetting it again. If it's available for purchase, then anyone else could do it but they'd also have to know what service was compromised to do any kind of authentication reauthorization as well. I doubt anyone would pay to do that, but the chances are not zero. Close to zero but not zero.

Quote:

---

For security questions your best advice is to choose any question but make up complete garbage answer for it and store that in a password manager. Don't truthfully answer it because social data mining is a real thing.

---

Thanks for this advice! I just realized with AI now a thing, it's gonna be easy for someone to figure out my first car through Facebook and image recognition.