Customer information is confidential because it contains home addresses, emails, phone numbers, and in some cases even payment information like credit card details. This is why it is usually a pretty big deal whenever customer information is stolen and posted online for the world to see.Unfortunately it looks like Verizon is experiencing something similar at the moment. According to the folks at ZDNet, it seems that as many as 14 million records of Verizon customers who called the carrier’s customer service in the past 6 months has been leaked online. However we should point out that this is not a hack, but rather it seems that an employee of an Israeli-based company called Nice Systems uploaded the information onto an unprotected Amazon S3 server.
Whether or not this was done on purpose remains to be seen as a spokesperson for Verizon says that they are investigating the matter. “Verizon provided the vendor with certain data to perform this work and authorized the vendor to set up AWS storage as part of this project. Unfortunately, the vendor’s employee incorrectly set their AWS storage to allow external access.”
The spokesperson also adds that at the moment, there is no indication that the information has been compromised. Nice Systems also claims that none of their systems or products have been breached either, but regardless the fact that it was sitting exposed is probably not the most comfortable of ideas.