Millions of Verizon Customers Information Exposed in Latest Data Breach

Eight years ago a best friend of mine was working for Verizon; she loved that job. She was working in a beautiful downtown Minneapolis store, was making great money and it wouldn't be too long until she was promoted to store manager.

Unfortunately, she lost that job over a data breach; but it wasn't her that accessed or leaked the information. It was actually a co-worker who was accessing the accounts of professional athletes and stole their information and used it for personal use. Surprisingly, she kept her job.

While this is not quite the same kind of data breach at Verizon, someone is definitely losing their job today.

According to USA Today, the names, addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, PINs of six million Verizon customers were leaked.

Nice Systems, which manages some databases for Verizon, was actually responsible for exposing the information when an employee erroneously uploaded a database to a cloud server and allowed public access to the file.

The good news is that Verizon says the only people who actually accessed the file were from Verizon, Nice and the cyber-security firm UpGuard, who detected the leak.

A spokesperson for Verizon claims, "There has been no loss or theft of Verizon or Verizon customer information."

Essentially that means whatever information was uploaded to this cloud, was never downloaded for personal or criminal use.

The Federal Communication Commission is currently investigating.

Catch Mandy James on “The Steve Shannon Show with Mandy James” on 97 ZOK from 5:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.