Verizon Customers Exposed by Third-Party Data Leak

It's difficult to protect your data these days, and now another information leak is causing millions of Verizon users to change their passwords as soon as possible.

Verizon confirmed Wednesday that data belonging to 6 million customers was leaked online in June.

News of the incident was first reported by ZDNet.

In a statement on the company's website, Verizon said the leak was caused by an employee of one of the company's vendors who accidentally allowed external access to information put in a cloud storage area.

Because it was an unprotected server, the data was available to anyone who had the public link to the cloud.

In addition to name, address, and phone number, some of the Verizon customer data included plain text PINs.

Incidents like this have cost people thousands of dollars, and they can give an attacker access to sensitive online accounts that have been protected by two-factor authentication.