A household name among American media companies, Verizon Communications on Wednesday began notifying employees that an insider may have gained access to their data. According to the breach notice to the Maine Attorney General, an unauthorized employee opened a file containing sensitive data of 63,206 other employees.
While customers are not believed to have been impacted in this breach, Verizon is warning that the exposed employee data could include Social Security Numbers, National Identifiers, full names, home addresses, DOBs, compensation information, gender, and union affiliations.
The unauthorized employee initially gained access to this document in September 2023, but Verizon did not discover the incident until December, almost 3 months later. At this time, it is unknown what the unauthorized employee may have done with the data, or if they intend to use it for nefarious purposes.
In the notification, Verizon states that there isn’t yet any evidence the data has been used maliciously. Fortunately, Verizon has taken steps to mitigate any potential fallout. In the statement, the company said, “We are working to ensure our technical controls are enhanced to help prevent this type of situation from reoccurring and are notifying applicable regulators about the matter.”
Verizon has also arranged for impacted individuals to receive free identity protection and credit monitoring services for 2 years.
“Verizon says they have no evidence the information was moved externally or used maliciously. Unless they are leaving out a key detail, this is about as innocuous as an ‘insider threat breach’ gets,” commented Roger Grimes, Data-Driven Defense Evangelist at KnowBe4.
“I will say that this is a testament to the monitoring that Verizon is ..
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