AT&T Paid to Delete Stolen Phone Records ⇥ wired.com

Kim Zetter, Wired:

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 received the payment from AT&T alleges that Binns was responsible for the breach and shared samples of the data with him and others after downloading it. He says he believes Binns allegedly stole “several billions” of records from AT&T, though WIRED was unable to confirm this. Reddington [a security researcher] understands that the data that was deleted was the only complete dataset taken by the hackers. Reddington says he does not believe the hackers posted the data publicly, though he’s not sure how many people received excerpts of the data Binns allegedly provided or what they did with it.

Also currently unknown: how big the sample data sets are, what is in them, and whether the full set has actually been deleted.