AT&T pays hacker
In the space of three(ish) days I’ve linked to articles where hacker payments total almost $25.4m.
The latest is $370k paid by AT&T to ‘delete’ the enormous amount of data that was stolen. Proof, apparently, was a video of the data being deleted from Cloud storage. Luckily it’s widely known that hackers do not use backups, and if you see ‘rm -rf stolenstuff‘ typed into a terminal? Job done…
Think of a business that has $25m in revenue. This is probably mostly profit, and this was only up to June for only two published breaches.
(As an aside the responsible person for the AT&T breach was arrested for a different breach in 2021, so probably not going to enjoy the cash).
Payments are absolutely fuelling this industry. In 2023 it hit $1.1billion. Think of a company with over a billion in revenue. Margins must be pretty good as well.
Can you ban payments? Not if it’s taking down infrastructure or healthcare, which it is. But at some stage Governments are going to have to start holding organisations and people in charge accountable.
Because it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
