AT&T has notified 1,600 subscribers that an employee gained unwarranted access to their private data in August.

The firm said the employee may have stolen driver's license numbers and Social Security numbers.

Federal authorities have been informed about the incident, and the mobile service provider said the employee has since been released from the company.

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"Unfortunately, we recently learned that one of our employees did not follow our strict privacy rules and inappropriately obtained some customer information. This individual no longer works at AT&T and we are directly contacting the limited number of affected customers," an AT&T spokesman said.

The news comes in the wake of a big cyber attack at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which involved the iCloud from Apple and an international computer hacking ring accused of stealing software and data. The stolen contents, which were worth US$100 million, included data related to Microsoft's Xbox and training information for pilots in the military.

While AT&T's breach of data was brought about by an employee, another company suffered a cyber attack that used a computer variant discovered in the previous month.

Internet giant Yahoo announced Monday that while its servers were invaded by hackers that exploited the variant of the Bash bug vulnerability in the past two weeks, no user information was compromised in the attack.

The Internet addresses point to Yahoo Sports servers as the compromised servers, according to a report by Jonathan Hall, president of Future South Technologies published Sunday night. The report also stated that WinZip, a file compression tool, and Lycos, a search engine created in 1994, were susceptible to the Bash bug.

TagsAT&T, AT&T security breach, security breach, Private information, social security number, Driver's license information, iCloud, Yahoo, Bash Bug