Verizon recently suffered a small but serious data breach; all affected accounts are now 'secured'
After T-Mobile, T-Mobile, and... T-Mobile again, it is now Verizon's turn to attract public criticism and generate major concern among its own wireless customers for failing to protect said customers' personal information against the havoc-wreaking actions of "bad actors."
One such "third party actor", whose identity is still either unknown or yet to be made public, has apparently managed to hack "about" 250 prepaid wireless accounts between October 6 and 10.
While that number is certainly low compared to both the totality of Big Red's prepaid customers across the US and the monumental extent of some of those aforementioned (semi) recent T-Mobile data breaches, these types of tallies can frequently vary greatly from day to day, so we definitely wouldn't be surprised if the nation-leading carrier finds more victims of the same cyberattack in the near future.
For the time being, Verizon claims all impacted users are aware of the "situation", which has been remedied (fairly) quickly, with "additional measures" put in place to protect breached accounts from "further unauthorized access or fraud."
While that's definitely a good thing, a lot of harm may have already been done by the time the operator's cybersecurity experts intervened to repair this breach. Unauthorized SIM card changes apparently took place on some of the hacked accounts, and things like customer names, phone numbers, billing addresses, price plans, and "other service-related information" are essentially compromised for good.
Obviously, you can't change your name or home address just because someone might have gained unauthorized access to your personal info, but "in an abundance of caution", Verizon reset the Account Security Codes (PINs) of all affected customers, and if you suspect that also happened to you, a similar revision is probably wise.
All "unauthorized SIM changes" should have been reversed, mind you, which is another point in Big Red's favor, and no banking info, passwords, Social Security numbers, or tax IDs were breached between October 6 and 10, which further makes this attack look less serious than T-Mobile's hacks from the last year or so. Still unacceptable but it absolutely could have been (much) worse.
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