A Seattle-based transgender former Amazon engineer has been arrested for allegedly hacking Capital One bank's systems to steal data it was storing on Amazon's Web Services cloud.
Paige Thompson, 33, was arrested for breaking into the bank's systems to steal the addresses, phone numbers and names of 100 million people in the United States.
A portion of that figure - 140,000 - also had their social security numbers and 80,000 had their credit card details accessed.
Thompson allegedly pulled it off between March and July of this year by breaking into the bank's servers through a misconfiguration in its firewall.
The data was being stored on Amazon's Web Services cloud but Amazon insists it is not to blame for the hack and that she exploited Capital One's systems to access it. Capital One admits that it was a fault in its infrastructure, and not Amazon's, which led to the breach.
After allegedly stealing the data, Thompson left authorities a trail of breadcrumbs, posting online about the hack so much that other hackers warned her she was facing jail.
Her online postings about the hack were reported to Capital One on July 17 in an email from a white hat hacker who had seen the information on a website called GitHub alerted the bank to it in an email.
What Thompson's motives were remain unclear. The bank said in a statement that it does not believe the hacker's intention was to steal people's money.
On social media, she posted about her desire to commit suicide and complained about her boyfriend being deported to Greece in spite of his 'AWS principality'.
"I’m not going to read Time Magazine, I’m not going to read Newsweek, I’m not going to read any of these magazines; I mean, because they have too much to lose by printing the truth"- Bob Dylan, 1965
Posts: 17611 | Location: Texas | Registered: May 13, 2003
Originally posted by smithnsig: “Transgender woman” Is that a girl dressing up to be a fella? Or a fella dressing up to be a girl?
Its a seriously mentally ill individual who also happens to be a very hateful individual. Its simply amazing there were enough weaknesses in security that would allow this 'thing' to violate Capital One's systems.
----------------------------- Guns are awesome because they shoot solid lead freedom. Every man should have several guns. And several dogs, because a man with a cat is a woman. Kurt Schlichter
And what in the wide world of sports is an "AWS principality"?
______________________________________________ Aeronautics confers beauty and grandeur, combining art and science for those who devote themselves to it. . . . The aeronaut, free in space, sailing in the infinite, loses himself in the immense undulations of nature. He climbs, he rises, he soars, he reigns, he hurtles the proud vault of the azure sky. — Georges Besançon
Posts: 11502 | Location: Denver and/or The World | Registered: August 30, 2004
Every Melon-Farming .com wants to be in "The Cloud" but can't figure out AWS or Azure firewalls and IP security. More to come. Pepper Your Angus and freeze your credit reports.
They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
Posts: 4797 | Location: SC | Registered: January 27, 2001
"Common sense is wisdom with its sleeves rolled up." -Kyle Farnsworth "Freedom of Speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences." -Mike Rowe "Democracies aren't overthrown, they're given away." -George Lucas
Posts: 6880 | Location: IL, due south of the Arch | Registered: April 20, 2005
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