A former Amazon employee accused of hacking Capital One in 2019 was convicted by a Seattle jury on charges of wire fraud and computer hacking, according to Yahoo! Finance.
Paige Thompson, 36, was accused of using her knowledge as a software engineer for Amazon Web Services to identify and use allegedly misconfigured cloud storage servers to access the data of more than 100 million Capital One customers.
TechCrunch reported that data accessed included the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as credit scores, limits, and balances.
Thompson posted on the information sharing site GitHub about the data heist. A GitHub user who saw the post alerted Capital One about a possible breach, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Capital One contacted the FBI after confirming the breach.
According to a superseding indictment filed by the DOJ nearly two years after Thompson was first charged, she also accessed the cloud-stored data of more than 30 other companies, which reportedly included the Ohio State Department of Transportation, Michigan State University, Ford, and Vodafone.
Yahoo! Finance reports that Thompson was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which bans a person from accessing a computer system without authorization.
Prosecutors said Thompson “exploited mistakes to steal valuable data and sought to enrich herself,” including using the servers she compromised to plant and mine cryptocurrency.
She was found not guilty of identity theft and charges stemming from device access fraud, according to Yahoo! Finance.
The Capital One breach was one of the biggest hacks of the decade, based on the number of people affected and the sensitivity of the financial information.
Shortly after the breach was publicly disclosed, Capital One’s security chief was replaced, and in 2020 the banking behemoth was fined $80 million by federal regulators and was required to improve its cybersecurity, according to Yahoo! Finance.
The company was later ordered by a judge to pay almost $200 million in class action damages. In 2019, the year of the breach, Capital One reported $28.6 billion in revenue.
TechCrunch reports that 6 million Canadians were also affected by the Capital One breach.
Thompson is expected to be sentenced in September, according to Yahoo! Finance. She faces five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.