Smartphone carriers are some of the worst companies to get hacked. You have your banking information saved on a company’s servers, and you don’t want that ending up in the wrong hands. In the case of this latest Verizon hack, it seems that the worst-case scenario may have happened. The company sent a letter to its customers saying that it noticed some unusual activity on its network. It later found out that this was because of a recent breach. Verizon says that the breach occurred between October 6th and October 10th.
Verizon was hacked, so how are the customers affected?
This hack resulted in a SIM swap attack. Verizon informed its customers, that due to the hack, the last four digits of their credit cards were scraped by the attacker and could have been used to perform unauthorized SIM swaps. This attack seems to have targeted customers on a Verizon prepaid plan, specifically. Fortunately, Verizon stated that, if a SIM swap happened with these customers, it was reversed. Hopefully, this happened before the attackers were able to do any real damage to the customers. However, The situation is far from ideal, as the attackers were able to steal phone numbers, postal addresses, price plans, and other bits of sensitive data. Verizon was able to confirm that the attackers did not steal banking data, financial data, passwords, social security numbers, or tax IDs. The company was able to reset pin codes for affected customers. That’s good, but it’s recommended that you go into your Verizon account, review your information, and inform the company of anything strange on your account. Also, any information on your account you can change, you should probably change it.
