Yesterday, Capital One Financial Corp announced that personal data of over 100 million individuals in the United States was obtained by a hacker. About six million people in Canada were also hacked. Fortunately, the perpetrator has been identified and made her initial appearance in U.S. District Court. The suspect is a 33-year-old Seattle native, Paige Thompson. She is a professional software engineer, who had spent some time working for Amazon in the S3 sector.
This widescale hack exposed valuable information of its victims, including names, addresses, and in some cases social security numbers. Capital One stated that the incident will cost them up to $150 million in legal support costs and credit monitoring. The U.S. attorney’s office reported the hacker gained access through a misconfigured web access firewall. Capital One’s stock took a 5.9% dip today in response to the incident. This financial data breach sheds light on potential weaknesses in cloud security and has other major corporations speculating if their databases were also infiltrated.
Business Barrage 