AT&T reportedly negotiated by an middleman, known as Reddington, appearing on behalf of a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group. The hacker initially requested for $1 million earlier than AT&T talked them all the way down to the quantity, which it paid on Could seventeenth in bitcoin, Wired writes.
The outlet experiences that Reddington, whom AT&T paid for his half in negotiations, stated he believes the one full copy of the info had been deleted after AT&T paid the ransom, however that it’s potential excerpts are nonetheless within the wild. Reddington additionally reportedly stated he negotiated with a number of different firms for the hackers, too.
Earlier than AT&T introduced the breach, it was reported that Ticketmaster and Santander Financial institution had been additionally compromised, by way of the stolen login credentials of an worker of third-party cloud storage firm Snowflake. Wired experiences that, after the Ticketmaster assault, hackers used a script to hack probably greater than 160 firms concurrently.
