Hacker Paid by AT&T to Erase Customer Records

Telecommunications company AT&T made a cryptocurrency payment to a hacker in the amount of $370,000 for deleting sensitive customer records.

These were all records that had been stolen and contained private customer information. The company suffered an extensive breach of their security and was attempting to minimize the damage to their company and to their customers by hiring a hacker to delete any stolen records.

AT&T negotiated with the hacker for the work, reportedly bringing him down from his original request for $1 million. According to reports, the hacker was from the group ShinyHunters. The company requested that the hacker show them video evidence that all of the records had been deleted, and they then paid him 5.7 bitcoin.

AT&T was the victim of a data breach that lasted from May of 2022 to January of the following year. The breach resulted in millions of customer records being stolen, and these included metadata related to calls and text messages across the AT&T network. The company was concerned that if the thieves did a reverse lookup with the data, they could identify individual customers and expose them to harassment, blackmail, and identity theft. The data could also be sold to marketing companies if the hackers chose to do so.

The Larger Hack

AT&T was not the only company that was a victim of these hacking attacks. While their data breaches were among the most notable and newsworthy, more than 150 companies were targeted as well, which included Santander Bank, Advance Auto Parts, and Ticketmaster. With millions of customer records being stolen, the risk of identity theft has been high for those affected, and the damage to public sentiment for these companies has been incredible.

AT&T is not working alone to deal with the damage caused by the data breaches. They are being aided by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), which is working hard to identify those responsible for the attacks.