Verizon customer data — including phone numbers and PINs — exposed by vendor

Names and phone numbers of millions of Verizon customers were made available on a publicly accessible storage area owned by one of the company’s vendors, according an enterprise security software company that discovered the exposed data.

“Anyone entering a URL in a browser would have been able to access it,” said Dan O’Sullivan, cyber-resilience analyst with UpGuard, the Mountain View, Calif., company that found the data.

Exposed were text files logging calls made this year to Verizon call centers between Jan. 1 and June 22, O’Sullivan said. In most cases, the logs included the names, phone numbers and addresses of Verizon subscribers. In some cases, account personal identification numbers used to verify callers’ identities were also exposed, O’Sullivan said.

The storage area belonged to Nice Systems, a Verizon vendor which does business related to call-center management. UpGuard informed Verizon of its findings on June 13, O’Sullivan said. A week later, access was shut off.

After the technology news website ZD Net published a story about the episode Wednesday, Verizon issued a news release apologizing to its customers.

 

 

For more details, see here: IT Security Explainer Video

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