Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Capital One Data Theft Impacts 106M People

Summary: Federal prosecutors charged Paige A. Thompson, a former Amazon systems engineer, with downloading nearly 30 GB of Capital One credit application data from a rented cloud server, affecting approximately 100 million people in the U.S. and six million in Canada, including about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers. Capital One learned of the theft from an email tip on July 17 that pointed to data stored openly on a GitHub account tied to Thompson, who posted about her activities on Twitter and a public Slack channel under the alias "erratic".

What you should know: A single count of computer fraud carries a maximum of five years and a $250,000 fine, while the exposure reached roughly 106 million people - and the breach surfaced only because someone emailed a tip, not because the company detected it.

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Topics
Cybercrime & Law Enforcement
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