Personal data of more than 14 million Verizon customers was leaked on Tuesday this week due to a misconfiguration on Amazon Web Services storage bucket. Hence, cyber incidents such as this highlight the importance of data protection practices on cloud platforms.
The security lapse was discovered by a research firm called UpGuard. And as per the details available to our Cybersecurity Insiders, Nice Systems which was supplying technology services to Amazon Web Services S3 Storage instance was the firm which caused the data breach.
Sensitive info such as names, phone numbers, and PINs are reported to have leaked in the data breach.
Verizon, however, reacted to this news and said that the leaked data was not accessed by hackers in any way or of any sort.
In the statement released by the telecommunication giant late yesterday, it was revealed that over 10% or 14 million of subscribers were affected by the breach. And the data was primarily of those who called Verizon’s customer service lines in the past six months.
Israel-based Nice Systems; a $4.7 billion company was not ready to comment yet on this issue. But some sources from the company who liked to be anonymous reported to our media sources that the company’s crime and compliance unit which provides fraud prevention, brokerage compliance, and enterprise-wide case management services were working with law enforcement to sort out this issue.
According to the prima facie compiled by the fraud prevention unit of Nice Systems, the data leak of Verizon customers took place due to a technical glitch caused by a human error.
Conversely, just a few hours ago, Verizon issued another press statement in which it stated that some media sources were overstating the incident. The spokesperson for Verizon told CNBC that the leaked data is now in safe hands and was only accessed by the UpGuard researcher who later reported the incident to Nice Systems and Verizon.
In other words, Verizon wants to say that there has been no data loss or theft in this incident and wants to specify that it was not an act of cyber attack.
Generally, most companies think that the servers on Azure and Amazon are most secure in the world.
But with the latest incident of AWS leaking over 14 million Verizon Customer we can easily come to a conclusion that the above-said line is a simple misconception.
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