A host of personal information which included the names and addresses of about 100 million individuals in the United States and 6 million people in Canada were hacked and decamped with by a hacker, announced Capital One Financial Corp on Monday. Reports said that the alleged hacker has already been arrested.
The United States authorities have identified the arrested individual to be Paige Thompson, 33 years, who is a former software engineer from a Seattle technology company. The US Attorney’s office said that Thompson has already made her initial appearance in US District Court in Seattle on Monday.
Information from her hack was posted by Thompson, according to a complaint filed in the District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle. The hack took place between March 12 and July 17 and the coding platform GitHub was used for the hacking. Capital One was notified of the security breach by another user who had seen the post.
The complaint said that the page where Thompson had posted the information contained her full name as part of its digital address which helped the US Law enforcement officials to be able to track the accused. Capital One had been able to identify the breach as late as July 19, the company said.
It was not immediately clear what the suspect’s motive was, said a representative for the US Attorney’s office.
Capital One said that the company is likely to be spending between $100 million $150 million more in 2019 because of the incident as the company needs send customer notifications, credit monitoring and legal support.
Capital One said that access to the credit card numbers of the accounts hacked had not been possible by the hacker. However the hackers managed to decamp with about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers, Information about phone numbers and credit scores were also accessed by the hacker.
Hackers also laid hands on about 1 million social insurance numbers of the company’s Canadian credit card customers.
The US Attorney’s office said that a misconfigured web application firewall was used an interface by the hacker to gain access to customers’ personal data.
An agreement to pay a fine of up to $700 million against settling of claims it broke the law during a 2017 data breach was announced by credit reporting company Equifax Inc last week. In that breach, hackers had siphoned away personal information of about 147 million people and such information included Social Security numbers and driver’s license data.
The news of the data breach had resulted in a drop of the stocks of Capital One by 4 per cent in late extended trading.
(Source:www,firstpost.com)
The United States authorities have identified the arrested individual to be Paige Thompson, 33 years, who is a former software engineer from a Seattle technology company. The US Attorney’s office said that Thompson has already made her initial appearance in US District Court in Seattle on Monday.
Information from her hack was posted by Thompson, according to a complaint filed in the District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle. The hack took place between March 12 and July 17 and the coding platform GitHub was used for the hacking. Capital One was notified of the security breach by another user who had seen the post.
The complaint said that the page where Thompson had posted the information contained her full name as part of its digital address which helped the US Law enforcement officials to be able to track the accused. Capital One had been able to identify the breach as late as July 19, the company said.
It was not immediately clear what the suspect’s motive was, said a representative for the US Attorney’s office.
Capital One said that the company is likely to be spending between $100 million $150 million more in 2019 because of the incident as the company needs send customer notifications, credit monitoring and legal support.
Capital One said that access to the credit card numbers of the accounts hacked had not been possible by the hacker. However the hackers managed to decamp with about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers, Information about phone numbers and credit scores were also accessed by the hacker.
Hackers also laid hands on about 1 million social insurance numbers of the company’s Canadian credit card customers.
The US Attorney’s office said that a misconfigured web application firewall was used an interface by the hacker to gain access to customers’ personal data.
An agreement to pay a fine of up to $700 million against settling of claims it broke the law during a 2017 data breach was announced by credit reporting company Equifax Inc last week. In that breach, hackers had siphoned away personal information of about 147 million people and such information included Social Security numbers and driver’s license data.
The news of the data breach had resulted in a drop of the stocks of Capital One by 4 per cent in late extended trading.
(Source:www,firstpost.com)
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