A former Amazon Net Companies (AWS) engineer has been discovered responsible of hacking into prospects’ cloud storage programs and stealing information linked to the huge 2019 Capital One breach. A US District Court docket in Seattle convicted Paige Thompson of seven counts of laptop and wire fraud on Friday, against the law punishable by as much as 20 years in jail.
Thompson, who additionally glided by the identify “Erratic” on-line, was arrested for carrying out the Capital One hack in July 2019. The breach was one of many largest ever recorded, exposing the names, start dates, social safety numbers, e mail addresses, and telephone numbers of over 100 million individuals within the US and Canada. Capital One has since been fined $80 million for allegedly failing to safe customers’ information and settled with affected customers for $190 million.
A press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ) states Thompson developed a software that scanned AWS for misconfigured accounts after which leveraged these accounts to achieve entry to the programs of Capital One and dozens of different AWS prospects. Prosecutors additionally say Thompson “hijacked” firms’ servers to put in cryptocurrency mining software program that may switch any earnings to her private crypto pockets. She then “bragged” about her misdoings in on-line boards and over textual content messages.
On the time, there was some debate as as to whether Thompson was an moral hacker or safety researcher on account of her uncommon candidness about her function within the Capital One assault on-line — she posted prospects’ delicate information on a public GitHub web page and shared the main points of the breach on Twitter and Slack. Earlier this 12 months, the Justice Division made it clear that it wouldn’t prosecute safety researchers beneath the Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act. However US prosecutors clearly weren’t satisfied Thompson’s actions fell beneath this exception.
“Removed from being an moral hacker making an attempt to assist firms with their laptop safety, she exploited errors to steal beneficial information and sought to counterpoint herself,” US lawyer Nick Brown mentioned in an announcement. Thompson’s sentencing listening to will happen on September fifteenth, 2022.