AT&T Paid $370,000 For the Deletion of Stolen Phone Call Records

AT&T paid more than $300,000 to a member of the team that stole call records for tens of millions of customers, reports Wired — 'to delete the data and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion.'

The hacker, who is part of the notorious ShinyHunters hacking group that has stolen data from a number of victims through unsecured Snowflake cloud storage accounts, tells WIRED that AT&T paid the ransom in May. He provided the address for the cryptocurrency wallet that sent the currency to him, as well as the address that received it. WIRED confirmed, through an online blockchain tracking tool, that a payment transaction occurred on May 17 in the amount of 5.7 bitcoin... The hacker initially demanded $1 million from AT&T but ultimately agreed to a third of that. WIRED viewed the video that the hacker says he provided to AT&T as proof to the telecom that he had deleted its stolen data from his computer...

AT&T is one of more than 150 companies that are believed to have had data stolen from poorly secured Snowflake accounts during a hacking spree that unfolded throughout April and May. It's been previously reported that the accounts were not secured with multi-factor authentication, so after the hackers obtained usernames and passwords for the accounts, and in some cases authorization tokens, they were able to access the storage accounts of companies and siphon their data. Ticketmaster, the banking firm Santander, LendingTree, and Advance Auto Parts were all among the victims publicly identified to date...
The timeline suggests that if [John] Binns is responsible for the AT&T breach, he allegedly did it when he was likely already aware that he was under indictment for the T-Mobile hack and could face arrest for it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.