Verizon is coping with an incident the place a hacker captured a database containing firm worker information, together with the total names of staff in addition to their ID numbers, electronic mail addresses, and telephone numbers. Motherboard reported that the database is legitimate, because the nameless hacker contacted them final week, and so they had been capable of confirm the information by calling a number of the numbers.
“These staff are idiots,” the hacker informed Motherboard by way of chat. The hacker is looking for $250,000 in alternate for not leaking the database and stated they’re in touch with Verizon.
A Verizon spokesperson contacted Motherboard confirming the incident, saying, “A fraudster lately contacted us threatening to launch available worker listing info in alternate for cost from Verizon. We don’t imagine the fraudster has any delicate info and we don’t plan to interact with the person additional. As all the time, we take the safety of Verizon information very severely and we’ve sturdy measures in place to guard our folks and techniques.”
The hacker claims they nabbed the database by social engineering their method into remotely connecting to a Verizon worker’s pc. The hacker’s account, in an electronic mail despatched to Vice, is that they posed as inside assist, coerced the Verizon worker to permit distant entry, after which launched a script that copied information from the pc.
The knowledge that was stolen may nonetheless be dangerous. In the event you’ve ever needed to get assist from a service over the telephone, you might need needed to take care of the completely different departments that deal with activating your SIM card. If a purported hacker poses as an worker and spoofed their quantity as one from the database, they might proceed to make use of social engineering for SIM swapping fraud. The method has been used incessantly over time as attackers manipulated accounts by means of carriers like T-Cell and AT&T to steal cryptocurrency or entry to social media accounts, together with one belonging to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.