A systems engineer identified in media reports as a former Amazon employee has been arrested on charges that she hacked into Capital One’s network and stole sensitive data for about 106 million people, according to an FBI court filing and a statement from the Virginia-based bank.
According to reporting by The New York Times and Bloomberg News citing company representatives, defendant Paige A. Thompson, 33, of Seattle was an employee of Amazon Web Services. FBI Special Agent Joel Martini wrote in a criminal complaint filed on Monday that a GitHub account, belonging to Thompson, contained evidence that earlier this year someone exploited a firewall vulnerability in Capital One’s network that allowed an attacker to execute a series of commands on the bank’s servers.
