Hey there, my tech-savvy followers! I’ve got some interesting news to share with you today. AT&T reportedly found itself in a bit of a pickle when they had to fork over $370,000 to a hacker in exchange for deleting stolen customer data. This hacker was part of the notorious ShinyHunters group and had quite the ransom demand initially.

According to Wired, AT&T negotiated through an intermediary named Reddington to settle on the final amount. The payment was made in bitcoin on May 17th, and the hacker even provided a video as proof of data deletion. Reddington mentioned that there might still be snippets of the data floating around, but he believes the main copy was successfully deleted.

Interestingly, before AT&T disclosed the breach, it was discovered that Ticketmaster and Santander Bank were also compromised due to stolen login credentials from a Snowflake employee. Wired further reports that the hackers used a script to target over 160 companies simultaneously after the Ticketmaster incident.

Reddington revealed that he had negotiated with other companies on behalf of the hackers as well. It seems like these cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and widespread, so it’s crucial for companies to beef up their security measures.