Telecom & Internet Infrastructure

Brightspeed, a major U.S. fiber broadband provider serving rural and suburban areas in 20 states, says it is investigating what it calls a potential cybersecurity event after a hacking group known as Crimson Collective claimed on Telegram to have stolen sensitive data tied to more than one million residential customers. The group alleges it accessed customer names, emails, phone numbers, home and billing addresses, account identifiers, payment histories with partial card details, and appointment and order records, and has threatened to release samples if the company does not respond. Brightspeed has not confirmed a breach but told BleepingComputer it is rigorously monitoring threats, trying to understand what happened, and will inform customers, employees and authorities as more facts are known, though it has not yet posted a public notice on its own channels. Crimson Collective has a recent track record, including a 2025 GitLab breach at Red Hat that cascaded into a Nissan customer-data exposure, which makes the new claims harder to dismiss even as they remain unverified. If accurate, the combination of personally identifiable and partial financial data would create serious risks of identity theft, phishing and account fraud for affected subscribers in some of the country’s most broadband‑dependent communities.