Verizon reported this morning that the customer account information distributed yesterday by a hacker is not real customer data, despite hacker's claims.
TibitXimer, the self-pronounced hacker, posted customer account information (names, addresses, passwords) on Saturday evening for what he said are around 300,000 Verizon Wireless customers.
ZDNet reported the news, then heard shortly thereafter from a Verizon representative that the company had "confirmed that [the leaked data] is not Verizon Wireless customer data".
Verizon then released a statement this morning saying that its system had not been hacked, and that "this incident impacted a fraction of the number of individuals being reported."
In the details
The Verizon statement also said, "Many of the details surrounding this incident are incorrect and exaggerated. No Verizon systems were breached, no root access was gained."
Before being removed from Twitter, hacker TibitXimer was able to amend his claim to say that he or she believed the data to be from Verizon FiOS customers, not wireless service customers.
It does seem, however, that although "no root access was gained" as TibitXimer had told ZDNet, Verizon is concerned about the legitimacy of at least some of this data.
The potentially affected areas of customer service seem to be in Pennsylvania and some surrounding states.
The hack to gain the data, according to TibitXimer, occurred in July 2012. Tibit attempted to make Verizon aware of the hole in its network security prior to the posting on Saturday.
Tibit lamented Verizon's data protection saying, "The worst part of it all, every single record was in plain text. I did not have to decrypt anything."
Verizon said that it "notified individuals who could potentially have been impacted and took immediate steps to safeguard their information and privacy."
Via TheNextWeb
