Capital One gets pwned by former Amazon Engineer, swipes personal info on 106 million US, Canadian credit card applicants

More than 1 million social numbers nicked among other details – FBI collars, charges software engineer

A hacker raided Capital One’s cloud storage buckets and stole personal information on 106 million credit card applicants in America and Canada.

The swiped data includes 140,000 US social security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers, we’re told, as well as one million Canadian social insurance numbers, plus names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and reported incomes.

The pilfered data was submitted to Capital One by credit card hopefuls between 2005 and early 2019. The info was siphoned between March this year and July 17, and Capital One learned of the intrusion on July 19.

Seattle software engineer Paige A. Thompson, aka “erratic,” aka 0xA3A97B6C on Twitter, was suspected of nicking the data, and was collared by the FBI at her home on Monday this week. The 33-year-old has already appeared in court, charged with violating the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. She will remain in custody until her next hearing on August 1.

www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/30/capital_one_hacked/

This is from Capital One.

Date: July 29, 2019

Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF) announced today that on July 19, 2019, it determined there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers.

Capital One immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability that this individual exploited and promptly began working with federal law enforcement. The FBI has arrested the person responsible. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual. However, we will continue to investigate.

“While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened,” said Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman and CEO. “I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”

Based on our analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and over 99 percent of Social Security numbers were not compromised.

The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of our credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Beyond the credit card application data, the individual also obtained portions of credit card customer data, including:

Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information
Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018

No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than:

About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers
About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers

For our Canadian credit card customers, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers were compromised in this incident.

We will notify affected individuals through a variety of channels. We will make free credit monitoring and identity protection available to everyone affected.

Safeguarding applicant and customer information is essential to our mission and our role as a financial institution. We have invested heavily in cybersecurity and will continue to do so. We will incorporate the learnings from this incident to further strengthen our cyber defenses.

The investigation is ongoing and analysis is subject to change.

 

According to this report, it was a “Cloud” server.

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www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/capital-one-data-systems-breached-by-seattle-woman-u-s-says?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic

 

AC

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