Roughly 14 million Verizon customers' records were discovered on an unprotected cloud storage server in June, reports ZDNet.
Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst at Mountain View, Calif.-based UpGuard, found customer names, addresses, account details and customer account PINs, or personal identification numbers, of individuals who called customer services in the past six months. Mr. Vickery discovered the records on an unprotected Amazon S3 storage server operated by an employee of Ra'anana, Israel-based Nice Systems, a third-party vendor used by Verizon.
Mr. Vickery told Verizon about the information issue in June, however, it took more than a week before the data was secured. Verizon said Mr. Vickery was the only individual to access to the cloud storage area, reports The Hill.
Verizon told CNBC the data breach has been "overstated," adding there has been no loss or theft of Verizon or Verizon customer information. The company also emphasized customer PINs were not linked to accounts, and were only used to verify customers at call centers.
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