Verizon Customers’ Data Hacked
Verizon has suffered a big data breach, which reportedly has resulted in personal data of millions of customers getting leaked. In fact, as per recent reports, Verizon has confirmed that sensitive personal data of at least six million customers have leaked online in June.
It was ZDNet that reported on July 12 of this hack that had happened in Verizon. The ZDNet post, titled ‘Millions of Verizon customer records exposed in security lapse’ states- “As many as 14 million records of subscribers who called the phone giant’s customer services in the past six months were found on an unprotected Amazon S3 storage server controlled by an employee of Nice Systems, a Ra’anana, Israel-based company. The data was downloadable by anyone with the easy-to-guess web address.”
Verizon, however, has responded to the incident with a press release that states- “As a media outlet recently reported, an employee of one of our vendors put information into a cloud storage area and incorrectly set the storage to allow external access.”. The release further adds- “This is NOT a Verizon Wireless issue. NO Verizon or Verizon customer information was lost or stolen, and this was NOT a breach or a hack…We have been able to confirm that the only access to the cloud storage area by a person other than Verizon or its vendor was a researcher who brought this issue to our attention. In other words, there has been no loss or theft of Verizon or Verizon customer information.”
Verizon has clarified that only limited data has been hacked. This has been made clear in the statement- “To further clarify, the data supports a wireline portal and only includes a limited number of cell phone numbers for customer contact purposes. In addition, to the extent PINs were included in the data set, the PINs are used to authenticate a customer calling our wireline call center, but do not provide online access to customer accounts.”
Verizon has stated, rather emphatically, that the figures have been overstated. As per Verizon, it’s approximately 6 million unique customers who have been affected due to this hack.
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