AT&T reportedly paid $370,000 to delete stolen customer data

Wired reports that AT&T negotiated through a middleman, named Reddington, who acted on behalf of a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group. The hacker originally asked for $1 million before the telecommunications company convinced them of the amount, which he paid on May 17 in bitcoin. To prove he was doing his job, he sent them a video showing him deleting the data, but the hacker was unable to verify the data. the violation continued.

Reddington, who was paid by AT&T to be the negotiating party, said he believes the only complete copy of the data was deleted after the company paid the ransom, but excerpts may still be on the network.

Before AT&T announced the hack, Ticketmaster and Santander were also reportedly breached, via the stolen login credentials of an employee at cloud storage company Snowflake. Wired reports that after the Ticketmaster attack, hackers used a script to potentially hack more than 160 companies simultaneously.