An outside vendor is accused of causing a massive data breach that exposed up to 14 million Verizon customers’ account information by leaking it online, a breakdown that could've had far-reaching ramifications.
Israel-based Nice Systems reportedly used Amazon’s S3 cloud platform to store logs of residential and small business wireline customer phone calls made to Verizon. The logs included the names, addresses, phone numbers and PIN numbers of the customers, according to Forbes, and were unprotected and unsecured on the cloud server.
The issue was not related to Verizon Wireless service.
UpGuard’s Chris Vickery came across the information and realized that a breach may have occurred. With the personal information as well as PIN numbers, a cybercriminal could potentially convinced a carrier to switch the SIM card attached to a customer’s account and hijack the account, Forbes reported.
Furthermore, according to ZDNet, if the hacker did take over someone’s account, they could potentially break into their email or any other accounts set up with two-factor authentication, since those systems usually use the phone number as one of the authentication levels.
Verizon customers who believe they may have been affected by this data breach should change their PIN numbers and passwords to protect their accounts, ZDNet advised.
Verizon has said that the number of user accounts potentially exposed is about 6 million, and released a statement saying, "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."
Twitter users were brutal in their reaction to the news.
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