AT&T Paid a Hacker $370,000 to Delete Stolen Phone Records
US telecom giant AT&T, which disclosed Friday that hackers had stolen the call records for tens of millions of its customers, paid a member of the hacking team more than $300,000 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. Chris Janczewski, head of global investigations for crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs, also confirmed using the company's own tracking tool that a transaction occurred in the amount of about 5.72 bitcon, and that the money was then laundered through several cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets, but said there was no indication of who controlled the wallets. Reddington tells WIRED that in mid-April, an American hacker living in Turkey and believed to be John Erin Binns—not the hacker who received payment—contacted him to say that he had obtained Reddington's AT&T call logs. After Reddington verified that the call logs were real, Binns allegedly told Reddington that he had also obtained call and texting logs of millions of other AT&T customers through a poorly secured cloud storage account hosted by Snowflake.
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