Verizon data breach of January 2023 explained

Verizon has experienced a cyber incident involving a data breach of Verizon customers. The data breach happened in January 2023 and was brought to the attention of Verizon in February 2023. Let us look at this cyber incident in more detail below.

Key points about the Verizon data breach

• The data breach affects 7.5 to 9 million Verizon home internet and cellular customers. The breach happened during the month of January 2023. The compromised data includes a dataset of 1.5 million home Internet customers from 2020. Another dataset includes details of 7.5 million cellular plan subscribers of Verizon. This data is from a time period corresponding to pre-2022 days.

• The data has been posted by a forum user on the Clear surface web. It is available for free download to forum users.

• The total size of the database that has been compromised is 2.23 GB.

• The compromised data fields for Internet subscribers include information like first names, usage statistics, contract status, speed records, and router specifications.

• The data pertaining to the cellular subscribers of Verizon include customer hashes, device types, rewards and discounts, and whether or not subscribers are enrolled in services, including Apple Music, Disney+, YouTube TV, and Verizon cloud services.

• Verizon had been made aware of the data breach on 8th February 2023.

• The lack of response and action from Verizon suggests that critical customer information including financial information has not been shared or accessed by the hacker. Also, the information is dated and may not be as current as it ought to be.

• The quality of this data breach may not impact the customer in a negative way. Internet usage statistics of plan statistics of a Verizon customer may not mean much to an average person.

You can read the entire story and timeline of this Verizon data breach on the Safety Detectives website. They were the ones to break this data breach story to Verizon in the first place.

From our experience, this data breach looks cosmetic at this point of time. Since the financial and other personal details of Verizon customers look safe, it may be easy to conclude that the data breach may not merit much attention from Verizon. Verizon’s cold response to the data breach incident is a reflection of the quality of data that may have been breached.