Here’s a quick public service announcement for any Verizon subscribers in our audience: If you’ve called the company’s customer support line in the last six months, you should probably go online and change your PIN. Forbes reports that the cell company goofed up recently and exposed the personal data of as many as 14 million customer service callers to the greater internet, including names, addresses, and PINs. The latter is especially alarming, since access to a customer’s phone account would be a key step in breaking through security measures like two-factor authentication.
The leak was pointed out to Verizon by an online security company on June 13, and patched shut on June 22. (No word on how long it was open before that, though.) For what it’s worth, Verizon itself says only 6 million accounts were compromised, not 14.