Verizon Fires Employees For Obama Cell Phone Breach

The account in question was from Obama's old flip phone that had been inactive for several months and not the President-elect's BlackBerry or other smartphone with e-mail capabilities or one housing large amounts of personal or financial data.

An Obama aide told CNN that the employees terminated were simply satisfying "idle curiosity" and were not permitted to access customer records unless asked to do so by the customer. The employees were only able to view billing information, as well as a call log with a list of dates, times and lengths of calls. They were not able to access the content of text messages or voice mails, the aide said.

Verizon reported the breach Thursday, when CEO Lowell McAdam issued a written statement publicly apologizing to Obama for the Verizon employee indiscretion. McAdam said Thursday that all of the employees who accessed the information were put on immediate leave without pay until the company determined which employees had improperly accessed Obama's account. At that time, McAdam stated that the company would seek appropriate disciplinary action, which could include termination, for those found culpable, he said.

"As the circumstances of each individual employee's access to the account are determined, the company will take appropriate actions," said McAdam in his written statement. "Employees with legitimate business needs for access will be returned to their positions, while employees who have accessed the account improperly and without legitimate business justification will face appropriate disciplinary action."

Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless said in an internal e-mail obtained by CNN that it has launched its own separate investigation to determine how Obama's information had been distributed internally and if it "had in any way been compromised outside our company."

McAdam also said in the e-mail that Verizon had already contacted appropriate federal law enforcement authorities regarding the breach.

Security experts say that Verizon's most recent breach speaks to a pervasive lack of process within companies regarding changing business roles and employee access to copious amounts of data. That lack of process is what often leads to internal data breaches, whether intentional or accidental, experts say.

"Every company has a lot of information assets and a lot of data records. But companies don't have the right business process to track who has access to what," said Deepak Taneja, president and CTO of security company Aveksa. "There are so many different records that dealing with it at that level of granularity can be a challenge."