UPDATED 10:12 EDT / DECEMBER 24 2012

NEWS

Verizon ‘Hacker’ Vanishes Into Thin Air, Along With Everything He Stole

Verizon looks to have gotten one over a hacker who claims that it was responsible for a security breach that led to the the private information of more than 300,000 of its Verizon Wireless customers being posted onto the website Pastebin.

The breach supposedly took place more than three months ago and led to the details of more than three million Verizon Wireless customers stolen, according to the claims of a hacker going by the name of TibitXimer. In its report on the story, ZDNet says that the hacker only posted the details yesterday, linking to them via Twitter, after the company failed to respond to his warnings and fix the vulnerabilities he had uncovered.

However, Verizon vehemently denied these accusations over the weekend, suggesting that the hacker grossly “exaggerated” claims that close to three million of its customer’s accounts had been hacked. The company further accused TibitXimer of spreading false information, something that apparently caused him to change his mind and revise the story. In TibitXimer’s updated post, it said that the hacked accounts actually belonged to Verizon FiOS and not Verizon Wireless.

Verizon issued the following statement to VentureBeat:

“The ZDNet story is inaccurate. This incident was reported to the authorities when we first learned of it months ago and an investigation was launched. Many of the details surrounding this incident are incorrect and exaggerated. No Verizon systems were breached, no root access was gained, and this incident impacted a fraction of the number of individuals being reported. We take any and all attempts to violate consumer and customer privacy and security very seriously, so we notified individuals who could potentially have been impacted and took immediate steps to safeguard their information and privacy. Verizon has also notified law enforcement of this recent report as a follow-up to the original case.”

Verizon went on to insist to the website that it wasn’t hacked at all; rather, it says that the information found its way into the ‘hacker’s possession after being copied by a third party marketer and subsequently ‘misplaced’.

It would appear that Verizon has been entirely vindicated from this episode. As of last night, TibitXimer’s Twitter account has been suspended, while the ‘stolen’ details have since been removed from Pastebin.


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