Verizon’s breach experts missed one right under their noses

Verizon Enterprise, a bulwark against cyberattacks at many large organizations, has suffered a security breach itself.

A flaw in the company’s systems allowed an attacker to steal contact information on Verizon Enterprise customers, the company acknowledged Thursday. Verizon said it has fixed the flaw and is notifying those users, but it hasn’t disclosed how many were affected. 

The intruder couldn’t get to any customer proprietary network information, Verizon said, referring to data such as call records and billing information.

The breach came to light Thursday in a post on the blog Krebs on Security. Krebs reported the hacker stole contact information for about 1.5 million Verizon Enterprise customers and offered it for sale for US$ 100,000 on a cybercrime forum. Because the data was offered for sale in the MongoDB format, among others it’s likely the attacker forced a MongoDB database at Verizon to dump its contents, the blog said.

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