A hacker has infiltrated Verizon’s database that includes the full name, email address, corporate ID numbers, and phone number of hundreds of Verizon employees.
It is unclear how much of the information provided is accurate and up to date. Motherboard can confirm that at least some of the information was valid by calling the phone numbers in the database. Four people who work for Verizon confirmed that their full names and e-mail addresses were correct, and a former employee also confirmed that their information was also correct.
The anonymous hacker stated that they were able to obtain this information by convincing a Verizon employee to give them remote access to their corporate computer. They then gained access to a Verizon internal tool that shows employee’s information and wrote a script to query and scrape the database.
“These employees are idiots and will allow you to connect to their PC under the guise that you are from internal support,” they told Motherboard in an online chat.
The hacker reached out to Verizon and revealed the email that was sent. They asked Verizon to pay them $250,000 as a reward.
“Please feel free to respond with an offer not to leak you’re [sic] entire employee database,” the hacker wrote in the email.
Verizon confirmed that the hacker has been in contact with the company.
“A fraudster recently contacted us threatening to release readily available employee directory information in exchange for payment from Verizon. We do not believe the fraudster has any sensitive information and we do not plan to engage with the individual further,” a spokesperson told Motherboard in an email. “As always, we take the security of Verizon data very seriously and we have strong measures in place to protect our people and systems.”
Although the hacker was not able to obtain sensitive information such as social security numbers and dates of birth, they can still use the information they obtained to impersonate an employee and reach the information of Verizon’s customers and employees alike.
It is unclear how damaging this data breach will be for the company, but further investigation is being conducted.
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