100 Million Capital One Applications Hacked

The FBI has arrested a 33-year-old software engineer in Seattle as part of an investigation into a massive data breach at financial services company Capital One.

Paige A. Thompson, also known by the online handle “erratic,” has been charged with one count of computer fraud and abuse, after an investigation uncovered that a hacker had broken into cloud servers run by Capital One and stole data related to over 100 million credit-card applications.
Exposed information, according to Capital One, included data collected in credit card applications between 2005 and early 2019 such as:

• names
• addresses
• zip codes/postal codes
• phone numbers
• email addresses
• dates of birth
• income

Beyond the credit card application data, the hacker 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

Capital One says that about 140,000 Social Security numbers and approximately 80,000 linked bank account numbers of its secured credit card customers were also breached.