AT&T reportedly negotiated through an intermediary named Reddington, who represents a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group. The hackers initially demanded $1 million, but AT&T later convinced them to agree to that amount, which they paid in Bitcoin on May 17. wired wrote.
The outlet reported that Reddington, who was paid by AT&T for his participation in the negotiations, said he believed the only complete copy of the data was deleted after AT&T paid the ransom, but it’s possible that excerpts remained. Reddington also reportedly said he was in talks with several other companies about the hack.
AT&T’s announcement of the breach follows reports that Ticketmaster and Santander were also compromised after the login credentials of an employee at third-party cloud storage company Snowflake were stolen. wired According to reports, after the Ticketmaster attack, hackers used scripts to attack more than 160 companies at the same time.
