Allegations of a Decade-Long Concealment
A bombshell lawsuit, recently unsealed, accuses technology giant IBM and its partner AT&T of deliberately concealing multiple data breaches by foreign governments over the past decade. The legal action, filed in 2020 by William Barlow, a former Vice President of Threat Intelligence at IBM, alleges that the companies not only failed to disclose these security incidents but actively worked to cover them up. The alleged breaches, which reportedly occurred between 2013 and 2016, involved infiltrations of IBM's core network and data it maintained in partnership with AT&T.
Barlow's complaint asserts that Chinese hackers, specifically the group known as APT 10, infiltrated IBM's core network, potentially breaching it more than 56,000 times during that period. The lawsuit also claims that at least two IBM subsidiaries were compromised, and these incidents were similarly concealed. The former executive alleges he personally witnessed numerous breaches and was pressured by executives to "tone down" internal reports and omit crucial details to avoid public distrust and negative market performance.
