Verizon confirms data from six million customers could be found online

The American provider Verizon has confirmed that data of six million customers was in a publicly accessible database. The report follows the discovery of the data by researcher Chris Vickery of security firm UpGuard.

Verizon is making the statements to CNN, claiming that the data was not stolen or leaked. It would be data from customers, including telephone numbers, names and PIN codes that serve to identify the provider. The security company tells CNN that the data will be of interest to scammers to gain access to a Verizon account and other accounts, even if they have two-factor authentication.

Vickery initially shared his discovery with ZDNet. He says it concerns data from 14 million customers who have contacted the American provider via customer service in the past six months. He found the data on an unsecured Amazon S3 server with “an easy-to-guess address.” The server belongs to the Israeli company Nice Systems, which focuses on customer contact and fraud prevention. According to ZDNet, 85 percent of Fortune 100 companies are customers of Nice Systems.

The researcher found the data in late June. It took a week before they were finally taken offline. According to Vickery, the data consists of six months of log files, spread over several folders. In some cases, additional data was present, such as email and home addresses. In addition, there would be a field for a customer’s ‘frustration score’, based on the language used during a conversation.