Verizon is blaming the leak of millions of its customers' data on a misconfigured system. Chris Vickery, a researcher with Cybersecurity company UpGuard, says he discovered the breach on June 13th and immediately informed Verizon. The company says they were able to fix the security hole on June 22nd.
The misconfigured system was blamed on a third-party vendor, NICE Systems, an Israel-based company that Verizon contracts to help with customer service calls. The security hole was ultimately blamed on "human error" while setting up an Amazon S3 storage server. Similar to how you can send a link to someone to a file on Dropbox, the data Verizon stored in this particular account was temporarily visible to anyone who had the public link.
Some of the information leaked online included customer's phone numbers, names and some plaintext PIN codes.
According to Upguard's report, a third-party analytics provider was using Amazon's S3 cloud platform to store "customer call data" from telecom providers which included Verizon.
Customers are being urged to update their PIN codes and not use the same ones twice.
Verizon told CNN Tech that there was no loss or theft of customer information.