A hacker has allegedly stolen the employee data of hundreds of Verizon workers, including names, emails, phone numbers, and corporate ID numbers, Motherboard reported on Thursday. The outlet verified the database’s legitimacy by calling several of the numbers included.
The hacker claimed to have obtained the data by posing as internal support, convinced an employee to permit remote access, and then deployed a script that copied data from the targeted computer.
“These employees are idiots and will allow you to connect to their PC under the guise that you are from internal support,” the hacker told Motherboard when they initially made contact last week, describing how they stole the information. They had also reached out to Verizon, asking for $250,000 to keep the database’s contents secret.
“Please feel free to respond with an offer not to leak you’re [sic] entire employee database,” they wrote.