Verizon Faces Data Violation, Customer Records Compromised
Zacks Investment Research | Jul 13, 2017 07:21AM ET
U.S. telecom behemoth Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) recently faced data violation, wherein records of 14 million customers were exposed. An employee of NICE Systems left the data on an unsecured Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) S3 storage server, making it vulnerable to threats from any external party. NICE Systems is an Israel-based company, which aids Verizon to facilitate customer service calls.
Verizon cites a misconfigured security setting on the server as the cause of violation. The company confirmed that it was informed about the incidence prior to any kind of loss or theft of customer information. The threat was detected by a researcher who has exclusive access to the cloud storage area apart from Verizon or any of its vendors.
The records include customer’s name, mobile number and account PIN. It also has customer’s residential address, email address and their Verizon account balance. Anyone with access to the records could have theoretically breached these subscriber details.
Verizon and NICE Systems are currently engaged in investigating the case. They have forwarded an apology to their customers.
This is not the first instance when a mobile carrier has suffered a data breach. In 2015, a data breach resulted in the exposure of similar information for 15 million T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) customers. In 2016, hackers stole data from Verizon’s enterprise unit, which provides IT services to companies. The perpetrators later put the data online for sale.
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Over the past three months, share price of Verizon declined 11.11% compared with the Zacks categorized Zacks Investment Research
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