Capital One target of massive data breach
A security breach at Capital One Financial, one of the nation’s largest issuers of credit cards, compromised the personal information of about 106 million people, and in some cases the hacker obtained Social Security and bank account numbers.
It is among the largest security breaches of a major U.S. financial institution on record. The bank’s stock dipped 6% at the opening of trading Tuesday.
SEATTLE —
Paige A. Thompson, who uses the online handle “erratic” — was charged with a single count of computer fraud and abuse in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Thompson made an initial appearance in court and was ordered to remain in custody pending a detention hearing Thursday.
Federal agents began tracking Thompson online after being notified by Capital One of a possible breach in July.
One June 18, Thompson sent a message on Twitter to another user saying, “Ive basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, (expletive) dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it.”
The FBI raided Thompson’s residence Monday and seized digital devices. An initial search turned up files that referenced Capital One and “other entities that may have been targets of attempted or actual network intrusions.”
Thompson was a systems engineer at Amazon Web Services between 2015 and 2016, about three years before the breach took place.
While that service is used by Capital One, there is no evidence that Amazon’s cloud system was involved in the breach.
“AWS was not compromised in any way and functioned as designed,” a company spokesperson said Tuesday. “The perpetrator gained access through a misconfiguration of the web application and not the underlying cloud-based infrastructure. As Capital One explained clearly in its disclosure, this type of vulnerability is not specific to the cloud.” Capital One says a hacker got access to the personal information of over 100 million individuals applying for credit. The Mclean, Virginia-based bank said Monday it found out about the vulnerability in its system July 19 and immediately sought help from law enforcement to catch the perpetrator.