If you’re a current or former AT&T subscriber, you might soon be eligible for a payout from a $177 million settlement over two recent data breaches at the carrier. On Friday, a US district judge in Texas gave preliminary approval to the settlement, with the goal of kicking off the process to distribute the funds before a final approval hearing on Dec. 3. According to court documents, the settlement fund consists of $149 million to address a major data leak in 2019, which allowed cybercriminals to exploit the data for years from both former and existing subscribers. Last March, AT&T finally confirmed the breach, sparking a wave of class-action lawsuits alleging the company had failed to safeguard the data of 51 million users, including their names, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth. The rest of the $28 million is meant to address a second incident involving a hacker breaching AT&T’s account with cloud storage provider Snowflake in April 2024. This enabled the cybercrimina...