AT&T allegedly gave $370,000 to a hacker to delete stolen customer data

AT&T allegedly negotiated through an intermediary, named Reddington, acting on behalf of a member of the ShinyHunters hacker group. The hacker originally asked for $1 million before AT&T convinced them to reduce the amount, which he paid on May 17 in bitcoin, Wired he writes.

The outlet reports that Reddington, whom AT&T paid for his part of the negotiations, said he believes the only complete copy of the data was deleted after AT&T paid the ransom, but that possible snippets of it are still in the wild. Reddington also reportedly said that he negotiated with several other companies for the hackers.

Before AT&T announced the breach, it was reported that Ticketmaster and Santander Bank were also compromised, via the stolen login credentials of an employee at third-party cloud storage company Snowflake. Wired reports that following the Ticketmaster attack, hackers used a script to potentially hack more than 160 companies simultaneously.