Verizon Customer Data Left Open For Anyone Who Cared To Look For It

There are nearly 114 million Verizon customers in the United States. Unfortunately, around 14 million of them have just become victims of a potential data breach. The potentiality of it is because the data was found by a researcher on an unsecured Amazon cloud server. And, while it may seem like "old hat" by now to hear of an intrusion, consider that in this one, transcripts of customer service conversations, customer names, the mobile phone numbers, and the PINs that allowed the customers full account access when calling customer service were left unsecured on the server and available for anyone who knew how to retrieve it.

Verizon does not believe the information was accessed by anyone other than the researcher who found it in June. However, the reality is that it is impossible to really know this. The significance is that with the name of the customer, the PIN and the cell number, anyone can contact customer service, possibly convince them they are the subscriber and do other harm

While you might immediately be skeptical about what damage can be done with this information, consider that even if you use multifactor authentication (MFA), many or even most services will send you a text message as that MFA code. If someone has that much information they ultimately can hijack your cell phone and retrieve that MFA code. This means that the possibility to log into your financial accounts and drain them of all funds exists.

Even though this could happen, it does not mean that utilizing any MFA that is available to you is a useless prospect. It is the opposite. Utilizing these services when available still lowers your risk of becoming a fraud victim significantly. Taking advantage of them is always better than not doing so because it is much more effort for someone to get access to those too.

For the time being, Verizon customers should strongly consider changing PINs for their accounts right away. It is unclear at this time if Verizon will require it, but Verizon customers should be proactive and do so anyway. With cell phones being so critical to our lives these days, why give a cybercriminal the opportunity to defraud you unnecessarily.

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