AT&T Paid a Hacker $370,000 to Delete Stolen Phone Records
A security researcher who assisted with the deal says he believes the only copy of the complete dataset of call and text records of “nearly all” AT&T customers has been wiped—but some risks may remain.
Reddington has facilitated a number of negotiations between the hackers and victims of the Snowflake account breaches. He says Binns asked him to contact AT&T “to facilitate a buyback of the data,” and that “given the importance of the data” and the potential for harm, “I felt an obligation to ensure he did not sell the data to anyone else.”
He notes that the sequence of events indicates that Ticketmaster’s Snowflake account was likely the first one breached in the campaign, after which the hackers targeted AT&T and others.