Former Amazon Employee Found Guilty Over CapitalOne Breach in 2019

Paige Thompson, a former Amazon employee who had been previously arrested for an alleged data breach of CapitalOne accounts, was found guilty by the court jury in Seattle.

Back in 2019, she was accused of leaking the accounts of over 100 million customers. The authorities claimed it to be one of the most controversial data breaches.

Ex-Amazon Employee Guilty Over Stealing Personal Data

Almost three years ago, Thompson was accused of gaining access to the data involving CapitalOne customers. The 36-year-old had reportedly exploited a web app firewall's misconfiguration.

The authorities were quick to track down Thompson's activities online. She was traced on Meetup, Twitter, and Slack. Moreover, a private Twitter message revealed that Thompson had dropped statements about the notorious Capital One breach.

"Ive basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, f---ing dropping Capital One's dox and admitting it," Thompson wrote in a message on Twitter at that time.

Moving forward, Thompson reportedly worked as a software engineer for the company. She took advantage of her knowledge to steal confidential information stored in the cloud storage server.

The data include email addresses, birth dates, bank account information, Social Security numbers, names, and more.

According to a report by Techcrunch on Tuesday, June 21, the CapitalOne data breach has also affected millions of Canadians.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Aside from stealing sensitive information from millions of CapitalOne customers, Thompson has reportedly obtained data from over 30 firms, the Justice Department stated in its indictment.

Some of the companies where Thompson accessed data include Ford and Vodafone. The Ohio Department of Transportation and Michigan State University were also involved.

Because of this, the former Amazon staff was found guilty of hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. According to others, Paige might be considered an "ethical" hacker.

With that, the Justice Department clarified that those security researchers with good intentions would no longer be prosecuted. However, the case of Thompson was different since she took advantage of the user's data. She also accessed the servers of crypto-mining plants.

This means that Thompson was officially convicted of her activities during the 2019 CapitalOne breach. The hacking of the Amazon cloud data was considered to be one of the biggest hacks in the past 10 years.

Following the breach that took place, CapitalOne decided to replace its security chief.

The US regulators slapped the company with an $80 million fine, citing that it should further heighten its cybersecurity protections.

Moreover, CapitalOne was sanctioned with another $200 million fine because of the "class action" damages. In 2019, the company managed to earn a revenue of $28.6 billion.

The schedule for Thompson's sentence will be on Sept. 15, as per US District Judge Rober S. Lasnik, according to Bloomberg.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry