UpGuard, a management platform that prevents outages and breaches, reported Wednesday that a misconfigured cloud-based file exposed the names, addresses, account details and personal identification numbers (PINs) of millions of US Verizon customers.
UpGuard initially reported the error could have impacted up to 14 million customers, but Verizon confirmed Wednesday it totaled 6 million customers, according to CNN.
Verizon told CNN that no loss or theft of customer information occurred.
UpGuard Researcher Chris Vickery discovered the Verizon data was exposed by NICE Systems, an Israel-based company that facilitates customer service calls.
Vickery alerted Verizon of the leak on June 13.
The security hole was fixed on June 22.
The breached information was due to human error when a NICE security setting was made public instead of private.
This means that all Verizon data stored on the cloud was temporarily visible to any customer who had the link.
UpGuard Cyber Resilience Analyst Dan O’Sullivan says that Verizon customers should update their PIN codes and refrain from using the same PIN twice.
